Prompting Legislative Agreement and Loyalty: What Role for Intra-Party Democracy?

Abstract

Existing research often suggests that a greater degree of internal democracy within parties could weaken party unity. This article tests this assumption and analyses the relationship between degrees of intra-party democracy (IPD) and legislators' attitudes towards party unity. The article uses data collected in the framework of the PartiRep Comparative MP Survey; and of the Political Party Database (PPDB). The study includes 796 parliamentarians in 45 parties, elected in 14 European national assemblies. The findings indicate that the legislators from more democratic party organizations tend to report more frequent disagreement and to assert their own opinions against the one of their parties.

Breakups hurt: Party switching and perceived proximity between politicians and their party

“…7 PartiRep is addressed to legislators and not to candidates; to account for this we compare legislators who served as MPs in the previous legislative term (incumbents), with rookie MPs (non-incumbents) that were elected for the first time in the following legislative term. 8 We additionally investigated the impact of Defections conditional on intra-party democracy, based on party statutes (following Close et al 2019) using data from the Political Party Database (Poguntke et al 2016). However, we did not find any moderating effect.…”

“…Accordingly, we create an index of loyalty: Loyalty Score. This index is built through principal component analysis (see Online Appendix for details), based on the first component, and combines the answers to different questions related to the degree of loyalty toward the party leadership and agreement 14 with the party whip (for a related discussion on loyalty and agreement in candidate surveys: Close et al 2019). This variable ranges from -3 to +3; it retains lower values when respondents believe that the party leader is too powerful, intra-party decision making is an excessive top-down process, and MPs should be free to vote in parliament (independently from the party whip) following mainly own opinions, or at most, voters' opinions, instead of the party line.…”

“…We control for some individual traits of the respondents. Specifically, given that gender might affect candidates’ reported level of disagreement (Close et al, 2019), we control for it through the dummy variable Gender , which assigns a value of 1 when a candidate is a male and 0 otherwise. Moreover, we also account for the political experience of candidates, measuring the years of experience within the party office; the variable Experienced also allows to detect which respondent belongs to the party leadership.…”

“…With the premise that splits represent a traumatic experience, and taking into account the psychological effects of a party's in-group bias (Martocchia Diodati 2017;Sacchi et al 2013), we argue that higher rates of defections strengthen the sense of belonging for those who remain so that politicians should perceive themselves to be closer to their party. We expect that such effect should be greater among incumbent MPs, as they directly experienced the trauma, and among legislators who are dissatisfied with the leadership (Close et al 2019), as they will experience a stronger cognitive dissonance, which brings them to align their ideological beliefs with their past behaviour (i.e., the decision to stay inside). We test our hypotheses on a sample of 13,256 politicians belonging to 92 parties that ran in 28 elections held between 2005 and 2015 in 14 countries.…”

“…Scholars started to investigate internal divisions from many different perspectives, analysing splits in parliamentary roll call votes (Kam, 2009), party switching and parliamentary defections (Heller and Mershon, 2009a), party fissions (Ibenskas, 2019), and disagreement expressed at party conferences (Ceron and Greene, 2019; Greene and Haber, 2015) or in parliamentary speeches (Bäck et al, 2016). Recent studies used political elite surveys as additional sources of data on intra-party disagreement (Carroll and Kubo, 2019; Close et al, 2019; Schumacher and Elmelund-Præstekær, 2018; Steiner and Mader, 2019).…”