Introduction: Towards a Better Understanding of Parliamentary Unity

Abstract

The study of parliamentary party unity has followed several lines of enquiry: describing the variation across political actors, contexts and time; comparing the multidimensional and dynamic aspects of parliamentary party unity; explaining it from a rational-institutional perspective with emphasis on macro-level arrangements and individual rational motivations. However, we know relatively little about how party organizations shape parliamentary party unity and this special section seeks to address this gap in the literature. This introductory article explains how the special section makes theoretical contributions to the concept of unity, provides alternative measurements and investigates several alternative determinants of unity.

Gatekeeping the Plenary Floor: Discourse Network Analysis as a Novel Approach to Party Control

“…Unity is the "observable degree to which members of a group act in unison" (Sieberer, 2006, p. 151). In line with the recent scholarship that approaches party unity as a dynamic and multidimensional concept (Close & Gherghina, 2019;Zittel & Nyhuis, 2019), I follow the view of Van Vonno, Malka, Depauw, Hazan, and Andeweg (2014), according to which unity is the outcome of the sequential interaction between agreement, loyalty and discipline. In other words, there are several ways to reach unity, and intraparty agreement is only one of them.…”

“…Variance in parliamentary party unity has been explained by system-level factors, especially the form of government and the electoral system (e.g., Carey, 2007;Kailitz, 2010), and party characteristics (e.g., Borz, 2009;Little & Farrell, 2017). More recently, party unity in the parliamentary setting has been approached as a multidimensional and dynamic concept (Close & Gherghina, 2019;Zittel & Nyhuis, 2019). Firstly, we need to make a distinction between (1) party unity observable in terms of legislative behaviour, (2) intraparty agreement or preference homogeneity, that is, party cohesion, (3) party discipline, meaning the internal rules and norms that make legislators act in certain ways (Hazan, 2014;Little & Farrell, 2017), and (4) party control, that is, the extent to which parliamentary party groups and their leaders, rather than individual MPs themselves or other legislative actors (e.g., the Speaker, the procedure committee or committee chairs), determine parlia-mentary proceedings, legislative activity and debating activity.…”

Which personality fits personalized representation?

“…Personalized representation can ultimately entail direct instrumental benefits for the individual politician in terms of increased attention from media, name recognition and votes among local constituents (Campbell et al, 2019; Carson et al, 2010). On the other hand, party loyalty is ‘the name of the game’ in most European parliamentary systems, and MPs are expected to act according to this norm of party loyalty (Close and Gherghina, 2018; Hazan, 2003; Ozbudun, 1970). Such norms are often enforced by parties through informal pressure or formal sanctions in terms of withholding campaign finances, candidate nominations, committee assignments and so on (Bøggild and Pedersen, 2018; Kam, 2009; Pearson, 2015; Russel, 2014).…”

A multi-stage and multi-actor perspective on intra-party competition: Introduction to the symposium

“…However, intra-party competition occurs in other stages of the electoral cycle than elections, and involves the strategic behaviour of more actors than electoral candidates. For example, the level of power and status that groups and factions within political parties have strongly affect many dimensions of intra-party politics, including party strategies, policy proposals and party manifestos (Polk and Kölln, 2017), cohesion in roll-call votes (Close and Gherghina, 2019), and party formation or termination (Bolleyer et al 2019). Moreover, the power and status of intra-party factions may also affect the outcome of intra-party nomination processes so that the preferred candidates of a particular faction are included on the ballot (Ceron, 2015).…”