How effects on party unity vary across votes

Stecker, Christian

doi:10.1177/1354068813509514

Cited by 43 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…The fact that the Canadian House of Commons operates under a Westminster parliamentary system is likely 22 Kam 2014;Sieberer 2006;Stecker 2013. 23 Cox 1987.…”

Section: Legislative Voting and Party Unitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Unity in Diversity? The Development of Political Parties in the Parliament of Canada, 1867–2011

Godbout¹,

Høyland²

2015

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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What explains the development of legislative party voting unity? Evidence from the United States and Britain indicate that partisan sorting, cohort replacement effects, electoral incentives, and agenda control contributed to enhancing party cohesion during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here, these mechanisms are evaluated by analysing a dataset containing all the recorded votes from the Canadian House of Commons, 1867-2011. Overall, we find that partisan sorting and the government's ability to control the agenda are central to the consolidation of parties over time. Our results underscore the need to integrate institutional rules and legislative agendas into models of parliamentary voting behaviour and suggest that strict party discipline can lead to the development of a multi-party system in the legislative arena.The emergence of permanently organized and disciplined political parties represents one of the most important developments in the history of modern parliaments. 1 While there is a vast literature on the influence of parties in the legislative arena today, we lack a clear understanding of how party org1anizations transform over time. Scholars generally agree that as the influence of representative assemblies increased during the nineteenth century, a number of countries began experiencing major political changes that prompted lawmakers to modify their behaviour in the legislature. As a result, parties became increasingly unified, primarily in response to the extension of suffrage and the modernization of the legislative process. 2 Although previous research appears to suggest a direct relationship between parliamentary organization and electoral politics, we find a wide range of competing theories to explain the emergence of party cohesion in the legislative arena. 3 Thus far, scholars have claimed that several different factors, such as the centralization of the leadership structure or the changing ideological preferences of members (either through replacement or socialization), have contributed to an increased number of partisan votes in the British Parliament and American Congress throughout the nineteenth century. 4 And while this trend has been observed in many other established democracies since then, empirical studies of these older cases are scarce and

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“…The fact that the Canadian House of Commons operates under a Westminster parliamentary system is likely 22 Kam 2014;Sieberer 2006;Stecker 2013. 23 Cox 1987.…”

Section: Legislative Voting and Party Unitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Unity in Diversity? The Development of Political Parties in the Parliament of Canada, 1867–2011

Godbout¹,

Høyland²

2015

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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“…. " Stecker's (2013) later analysis of party unity on roll call voting in 16 German state parliaments between 1990 and 2011 is one of the most comprehensive analyses of party voting at the subnational level; he also concludes that perfect unity is the rule rather than the exception.…”

Section: The Study Of Party Unity At the Subnational Levelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Achieving party unity in the Netherlands: Representatives’ sequential decision-making mechanisms at three levels of Dutch government

Vonno

2019

Party Politics

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How do parties at different levels of government get their representatives to vote according to the party line? Employing the sequential decision-making approach to party unity, we explore the relative importance of cue-taking, party agreement, party loyalty, and party discipline as individual representative decision-making mechanisms. On the basis of the Dutch version of the PartiRep comparative Member of Parliament survey, we find few differences between national and subnational representatives when it comes to the first two mechanisms, but party loyalty and party discipline seem to play a less important role in determining representatives’ decision whether to vote with the party group line. This is, in part, in line with our theoretical expectation that subnational representatives are less likely to be motivated by office-seeking and vote-seeking than their national counterparts.

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“…Yet, scholars of legislative politics are of course aware that voting unity is not the same as intra-party preference homogeneity or programmatic cohesion: They are precisely interested in how discipline and the institutions which foster discipline can lead to homogenous voting behavior, i.e. unity, even when the underlying policy preferences of MPs diverge (e.g., Hazan 2003;Sieberer 2006;Stecker 2013). In short, party unity with regard to the voting behavior of MPs is an important phenomenon in itself, but measures of such voting unity can give us at best a distorted picture of the general preference heterogeneity across issue dimensions among party leaders.…”

Section: Quantitative Approaches On Intra-party Heterogeneity and Relmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intra-party heterogeneity in policy preferences and its effect on issue salience: Developing and applying a measure based on elite survey data

Steiner

Mader

2017

Party Politics

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Quantitative research on the positions of political parties and party competition regularly invokes the assumption that parties are unitary actors with homogenous policy preferences. Drawing on Comparative Candidates Survey (CCS) data from 28 elections in 21 developed democracies, we show that candidates often hold quite heterogeneous issue positions and that the extent of this heterogeneity varies significantly across parties and, most interestingly, even within parties across different issue dimensions. In an effort to explore the implications of such intra-party heterogeneity for party strategy and competition, we argue that intra-party heterogeneity and issue salience go together, because parties will emphasize those issues on which intra-party heterogeneity is low. Empirically, we relate our measures of intra-party heterogeneity from the CSS to data on issue salience from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and the Manifesto Project. Across different issue dimensions and the two salience measures, we consistently find that parties attach lower salience to issues over which they are internally divided.

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How effects on party unity vary across votes

Cited by 43 publications

References 41 publications

Unity in Diversity? The Development of Political Parties in the Parliament of Canada, 1867–2011

Unity in Diversity? The Development of Political Parties in the Parliament of Canada, 1867–2011

Achieving party unity in the Netherlands: Representatives’ sequential decision-making mechanisms at three levels of Dutch government

Intra-party heterogeneity in policy preferences and its effect on issue salience: Developing and applying a measure based on elite survey data

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