The Impact of Legislatures

A Quarter-Century of The Journal of Legislative Studies

Philip Norton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000095845
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

The Impact of Legislatures brings together key articles and path-breaking scholarship published in The Journal of Legislative Studies during its first 25 years of publication, enabling the reader to make sense of the impact of legislatures in the modern world.

Encompassing theory, comparative analysis, and county-based empirical studies, the volume examines the impact of legislatures as the key representative institutions of nations, addressing their relationships both to government and to the people. Legislatures are ubiquitous. They provide legitimacy to measures of public policy and to government. As such, they are key to how a nation is governed. But they do much more than confer legitimacy. They are generally multi-functional and functionally adaptable bodies, and are an essential link between citizen and government. However, scholarship on them has not been extensive and has often been descriptive and country- specific, limiting the capacity to make sense of them as a particular species of institution. The chapters in this volume reflect scholarship that helps the reader appreciate the significance of the place and consequences of legislatures, examining not only the relationship between the legislature and the executive, but also the oft-neglected relationship between legislatures and the people.

Reflecting the growing body of research in the field of legislative studies, carried by The Journal of Legislative Studies since its inception in 1995, The Impact of Legislatures is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the impact of legislatures in the world today.

Party unity in parliamentary democracies: A comparative analysis

ULRICH SIEBERER

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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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Parliamentary voting is the fundamental mechanism for making collectively binding decisions in modern democracies. Formally, these decisions are made by individual deputies with a free mandate only accountable to their voters, though the reality in parliamentary democracies looks different: usually, the members of parliamentary party groups (PPGs) vote together – PPGs are the relevant actors in parliamentary business.¹ Parts of the literature have reacted to this by treating PPGs as unitary actors, with regard to both policy decisions and coalition formation.² Party specialists, on the other hand, emphasise the heterogeneity of political parties.³ Given the diversity of interests within parties, party unity in legislative voting cannot simply be assumed, but needs to be explained. What makes individual deputies vote in line with their parliamentary parties? Even though this question has recently received increased attention,⁴ there are still only very few comparative studies on this building block of the theory of parliaments.

This article attempts to take one step in this direction by analysing party unity in 11 established parliamentary democracies. First, it presents a theoretically consistent model that explains party unity as the result of individual decisions taken by rational deputies reacting to the institutional incentives and constraints in their respective countries.⁵ From this model, hypotheses are derived that are tested against available data both at the system level and at the level of individual parties. The results support many of the institutional hypotheses, but shed doubt on recent claims in the literature expecting governing parties to be more unified than opposition parties. The implications of these findings for legislative studies more generally are discussed before concluding.

PARTY UNITY: A PHENOMENON IN NEED OF EXPLANATION

It is useful to start by clarifying some terminological issues. The terms ‘unity’, ‘cohesion’ and ‘discipline’ are often used interchangeably. None the less, it is useful to keep them apart as referring to different analytical concepts, despite the difficulties of isolating the concepts in empirical research. In line with recent work, ‘unity’ is here used for the observable degree to which members of a group act in unison. Unity can be brought about via two analytically distinct paths. First, it can be caused by shared preferences; this is referred to as ‘cohesion’. Second, unity can result from sanctions or positive incentives that make members vote together even though their preferences differ; this is referred to as ‘discipline’.⁶

Ozbudun has produced the first broad comparative analysis of party unity.⁷ Despite its path-breaking character, his study suffers from two weaknesses. First, it employs a very heterogeneous array of explanatory concepts lacking theoretical consistency. Second, Ozbudun does not systematically test his hypotheses, mainly due to the lack of data on legislative voting behaviour suitable for statistical analysis. There are some more recent comparative studies using roll-call data that focus mainly on differences between parliamentary and presidential systems.⁸ A few other studies explain party unity in a very small sample of parliamentary systems.⁹ In addition, there have been several attempts to explain party unity in individual parliamentary systems.¹⁰ An early focus was on the UK, particularly during the turbulent 1970s.¹¹ Recent country studies based on roll-call data are also available for Germany, Norway, Denmark, Belgium and, most recently, Italy.¹²

A broad comparative study of party unity in parliamentary democracies based on roll-call data is still lacking. There are a number of reasons for limiting such a study to parliamentary democracies, that is, to countries in which the government can be forced to resign by a majority vote in parliament. On the theoretical level, a parliamentary system of government by itself offers strong incentives for party unity as a precondition of a cabinet’s survival and effectiveness. Empirically, it is observed that party unity is much higher and more stable in parliamentary systems than in presidential systems. This is particularly true when established western European and Anglo-Saxon countries are analysed. A comparative study including both parliamentary and presidential systems would ascribe most of the variance to the regime type and would leave unexplained smaller but none the less interesting differences within the group of parliamentary systems.

AN EXPLANATORY MODEL

In order to explain different levels of party unity in parliamentary systems, I propose a non-formal model based on the rationalist variant of the ‘new institutionalism’. The actors in this model are mainly members of parliament (MPs) who are divided into two groups–the PPG leadership and the backbenchers. When extra-parliamentary party leaders or government ministers are relevant they are treated as part of the PPG leadership, in line with the model of the British front bench. Actors are assumed to be motivated primarily by the desire to be re-elected. Personal rise in power and influencing policy are seen as secondary motivations whose realisation is tied to the necessary condition of being re-elected.¹³

Members of the PPG leadership who usually do not have to worry about re-election because they are placed high on party lists or run in safe districts are, furthermore, assumed to care about the unity of their PPG. They internalise the interests of the PPG as a collective group.¹⁴ Ensuring PPG unity helps the leadership achieve its secondary motivations. First, the PPG leadership can exercise disproportionate influence on the policy position of the PPG, thus furthering its own policy interests. Second, successful management of the PPG helps secure leadership positions with the privileges tied to these positions and may promote personal advancement to other attractive jobs, such as cabinet offices.

For backbenchers, on the other hand, re-election is a more pressing concern. In addition, they strive for personal advancement within the hierarchy of the PPG and parliament. The degree to which backbenchers have incentives to pursue these goals by toeing the party line or by taking independent positions depends on the institutional determinants of re-election and potential paths of promotion. If individual MPs can reach their goals only through the party leadership, they are likely to toe the party line.¹⁵ If alternative paths open up through a direct relationship with voters or through alternative arenas of influence, such as parliamentary committees, deputies can be faced with contradictory demands, which call into question their loyalty towards their PPG and can thus lead to lower party unity. It is important to emphasise that unity is not necessarily lower in this case. Depending on the preference ordering and the weight given to contradictory demands, deputies can also decide to remain loyal to the demands of their PPG.

The model includes three groups of independent variables, the first of which is temporarily prior to the other two (Figure 1). The variables in the first group deal with the way deputies gain their seats, whereas the variables in the other two groups relate to the dependency of deputies on their PPGs in parliament. Here I distinguish between structural dependencies, which apply to all MPs in a given parliament, and situational resources, which vary between parties. The variables in the first two groups are constant for all parties acting in a particular system and thus seek explanation of party unity at the level of the political system.¹⁶ The variables in the third group vary within systems and help explain differences at the level of individual parties.

The model conceptua...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: A Quarter-Century of Scholarship
• Developing Theory
• Comparing Legislatures
• Party, Division and Consensus
• Representation
• Influence of Members
• Parliaments and Citizens
• Parliamentary Questions
• Index