How Strong Should Our Party Be? Party Member Preferences Over Party Cohesion

Abstract

In this article, we seek to explain when and why political parties pressure their members to vote with the party. We model party cohesion as an endogenous choice of preference alignment by party members. Couched in Krehbiel's (1996, 1998) pivotal politics model, the formal theory advanced here shows party cohesion to be related to the initial preference alignment of party members, the divergence in preferences between parties, the cohesion of the opposing party, the party's size, and the party's majority or minority status. We solved the model analytically for generalized‐partial equilibrium results and further analyzed it through computer simulations. We tested the model's predictions in the U.S. Senate using Rice party cohesion scores from the 46th through 104th Congresses. The data analyses show strong support for this theory of endogenous choice of party pressure.

Party Influence on Roll Call Voting: A View from the U.S. States

“…Next, the attainment of majority status can confer upon the majority party privileges that can make it easier for the party to enforce discipline among members (Grumm 1964;Scully and Patterson 1997;Volden and Bergman 2006). The relationship between committee appointment power and majority party status is one such privilege.…”

Parties, Coalitions, and the Internal Organization of Legislatures

“…Conditional party government (CPG) theory (Aldrich and Rohde 2001;Rohde 1991) and endogenous party government theories (Patty 2008;Volden and Bergman 2006) adopt this approach. Forming a legislative coalition provides various collective benefits to members.…”

Toward a conditional model of partisanship in policymaking

“…Party discipline and party leadership in exchange for collective goods provided to members of the party: Theories of conditional party government (see Aldrich and Rohde, 2001) and of endogenous party government (Volden and Bergman, 2006;Patty, 2008) see parties as floor-voting coalitions, in which parties have capacities to discipline their elected officials and incite them to support bills even in case of internal divergence within the party. These incentives take the form of potential sanctions, such as the threat of non-renomination for the next election, but even more of collective benefits, including appointments to prestigious committees, the allocation of staff resources or even, in more general terms, the party's reputation in the electorate (see also Cann and Sidman, 2011).…”