The level and causes of party unity are under-researched topics in parliamentary democracies, particularly in comparative perspective. This article presents a non-formal model explaining party unity ...in legislative voting as the result of individual legislators' decisions reacting to the incentives and constraints created by their respective institutional environments. Hypotheses derived from the model are tested against empirical data on party unity in 11 western parliamentary democracies since 1945. On the system level, central party control over nominations and intra-parliamentary resources as well as the strength of parliamentary committees with regard to policy decisions are shown to affect party unity as expected by the model. On the level of individual parties, governing parties are less unified than opposition parties and larger parties show higher unity than smaller ones. Both results shed doubt on frequent claims in the literature.
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BFBNIB, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
Abstract
The article shows that Germany established a short-lived but fully operative parliamentary system of government in its first democratically elected national parliament in 1848—some 70 years ...earlier than usually assumed. Qualitative evidence shows that the cabinet was responsible to the assembly and that parliamentary majorities forced cabinets to resign. Roll-call analysis reveals behavioural patterns that are typical for parliamentary government such as high party unity, cohesive voting by the governing coalition and substantially higher success rates for cabinet parties. These findings challenge claims of a ‘German exceptionalism’ and demonstrate the danger of hindsight bias in reading historical processes of parliamentarisation backwards. Instead, they suggest that successful parliamentarisation critically depends on the balance of power between democratic and autocratic forces and the degree to which old elites can be integrated in the new democratic order.
Electoral rules should affect parliamentary behavior. In particular, deputies elected from single-member districts should be more likely to deviate from the party line than deputies elected under ...proportional representation. This paper suggests a framework for conceptualizing and modeling the effect of the type of mandate on deputies’ propensity to cast deviating votes in mixed electoral systems. The proposed modeling strategy uses disaggregated voting data and integrates dependencies among observations in a multi-level design. Empirically, the paper analyses voting behavior in the 16th German Bundestag (2005–2009) and shows that the odds of district MPs to deviate are significantly higher despite frequent claims that the two types of MPs behave alike. However, the behavioral differences cannot be attributed to attempts by district MPs to follow their local constituents as competing principals.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
Why do members of parliament (MPs) vote against the party line? Recent explanations of party unity focus on MPs cross-pressured between the demands of competing principals such as their party and ...local constituencies. This article tests key claims of the Competing Principals Theory on the level of individual deputies. It relies on public statements in which MPs explain their voting behaviour. This new data source allows more direct insights into MPs’ decision-making calculus than roll-call data. The article develops a theoretical model for the usage of such statements and the position MPs take vis-à-vis the party line. Empirically, it studies Explanations of Votes on all roll-call votes in the 16th German Bundestag (2005–2009) statistically controlling for sample selection. The analyses show among others things that district MPs take more critical stances, party leaders dissent less and government MPs are more likely to voice reservations without defecting in voting.
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Entscheidungen von politischen Akteuren „in eigener Sache“ werden in Öffentlichkeit und Wissenschaft zu Recht kritisch betrachtet. Führen diese nicht zwangsläufig dazu, dass politische Partien eigene ...Interessen verfolgen und damit Gemeinwohlüberlegungen auf der Strecke bleiben? Diese Frage stellt sich besonders bei Themen wie der Parteienfinanzierung, in denen Parteien gemeinsame Interessen haben und diese im Sinne einer Kartelllogik auf Kosten der Gesamtgesellschaft durchsetzen können. Ohne die Relevanz dieser Problematik abzustreiten, argumentiert dieser Beitrag, dass Entscheidungen in eigener Sache weniger problematisch sein können, wenn sie dem politischen Wettbewerb unterworfen sind.
Parliaments are more than legislative bodies. However, we lack an adequate understanding of the theoretical relationship between different facets of parliamentary activity or 'parliamentary ...functions'. Relying on the principal-agent framework, this article argues theoretically that parliamentary power is a multidimensional concept comprising three distinct mechanisms to ensure policy outputs in line with the collective preferences of parliaments: direct influence on policymaking, the ex ante selection of external officeholders, and the ex post control of the cabinet. These mechanisms mirror the classic legislative, electoral, and control functions of parliaments. Empirically, the paper uses factor analysis of newly developed indicators for electoral powers and established measures of legislative and control resources to show that the institutional powers of 15 Western European parliaments comprise four distinct dimensions. These dimensions match the three theoretically derived mechanisms with committee power as an additional factor. Locating the 15 parliaments in this multidimensional space of parliamentary powers demonstrates that classifications based solely on lawmaking lead to biased assessments of parliamentary strength and weakness. Instead, the paper provides a more nuanced picture of the ways in which Western European parliaments can influence policymaking under the conditions of delegation.
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This article argues that government parties can use parliamentary questions to monitor coalition partners in order to reduce agency loss through ministerial drift. According to this control logic, ...government parties have particular incentives to question ministers whose jurisdictions display high policy conflict and high electoral salience and thus hold the prospect of electorally damaging ministerial drift. Multivariate regression analysis of all parliamentary questions in the German Bundestag between 1980 and 2017 supports this hypothesis, showing that cabinet parties address substantially and significantly more questions to ministries held by coalition partners on salient and ideologically divisive issues. This interactive effect does not occur for opposition parties or questions posed to own-party ministers. These findings, as well as the temporal patterns of questioning over the electoral cycle, indicate that control within coalitions is a distinct motivation for questioning ministers that cannot be reduced to existing explanations such as electorally motivated issue competition.
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We examine whether there is a basic space in a parliament which grew out of a revolution and had no prior history of parliamentarism: the Frankfurt Assembly of 1848/49. We scale all 299 roll call ...votes to determine the dimensionality of voting as well as the positions of deputies and their party groups. We find two dimensions of disagreement and show that they can be interpreted in line with historical scholarship as conflict over who should govern (the people or the monarch) and conflict over state borders (inclusion or exclusion of Austria). We find that the party groups line up on the first dimension in ways consistent with historical scholarship on their political inclinations, but we also find wide variation in deputies’ positions within and across parties. Moreover, deputies’ positions turn out to be polarized on the territorial dimension but not on the government dimension. We conclude that ideological constraint was the primary structuring force in parliamentary voting. Our results underscore the pervasiveness of low dimensionality in parliamentary voting even in the absence of strong parties and agenda control.
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Agenda setting determines whether and how topics are discussed and voted in parliament. Many parliaments delegate this task to a specific body charged with coordinating parliamentary business. ...However, we know little about the composition and powers of these “coordination committees” (CC). This paper maps the existence, composition, and institutional powers of coordination committees across 31 European parliaments. It shows that CCs exist in most parliaments and have a relatively similar composition, usually including the president of parliament, their deputies, and party group representatives, but vary strongly in their agenda-setting powers. Exploring whether this variation is related to the functional need for coordination, we find limited evidence that larger sizes of parliaments and higher ideological polarization between parties are associated with stronger coordination committees. In terms of this HSR Special Issue, we show that CCs as horizontal collective actors exist even in a hierarchical organization such as a parliament and have relevant, albeit variable, resources.
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Research on mixed electoral systems provides inconclusive findings on the question whether members of parliament (MPs) elected in single-member districts are more likely to vote against the party ...line than MPs elected via closed party lists. This article rejects both the hypothesis of a general “mandate divide” and the competing claim that contamination effects completely wash out behavioral differences. Instead, we argue that electoral incentives to defect are stronger for a specific type of MP—those who run only in a district and are electorally insecure. Statistical analyses of roll call votes in the German Bundestag covering more than 60 years support this “conditional mandate divide” against alternative hypotheses. These findings suggest a more nuanced view on electoral system effects in mixed electoral systems and highlight the importance of electoral competition for incentivizing MPs to side with district demands if those conflict with the party line.
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