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

Abstract

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

Legislative Party Switching and the Changing Nature of the Canadian Party System, 1867–2015

“…By that we mean that politics both in Parliament and the electorate has been increasingly organized around party discipline and party-based voting (see Cox 1987 for an analogous treatment in the case of the British House of Commons). For one, party unity in the House of Commons is much higher now than it was in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century (Godbout and Høyland, 2017), a factor that is endemic to the concept of party institutionalization in world parliaments (see Thames, 2007). Second, parties have differentiated themselves from each other in terms of platforms and group support in the electorate.…”

Bonding in Pursuit of Policy Goals: How MPs Choose Political Parties in the Legislative State of Nature

“…The second distinct result of our study is that functioning parliamentary parties can emerge within a few months whereas previous accounts focused on gradual processes over years or even decades (Aldrich ; Eggers and Spirling ; Godbout and Høyland ). This finding is relevant because the continuous and uninterrupted processes of democratization documented for Anglo‐Saxon countries are rather exceptional.…”

“…In this view, parties are decision heuristics for voters that enable MPs to establish long‐standing links with the electorate (Aldrich ; Cox and McCubbins ). Many implications of these arguments find empirical support in the process of party emergence and development in (mostly) Anglo‐Saxon democracies (Aldrich ; Bowler ; Carroll, Cox, and Pachón ; Cox ; Cox and McCubbins ; Godbout and Høyland ).…”

When the team’s jersey is what matters: Network analysis of party cohesion and structure in the Canadian House of Commons

“…Strong party discipline may thus be useful to a point but limited in the degree of partisan cohesion it can promote. This suggests that the behavioral adaptation found over time by Godbout and Høyland (2013, 2017) is indeed spurred by legislative rules and structures as they have argued, but that this adaptation may have its limits and still permit a fair amount of dissent as members choose whether to play alongside their teams or go it alone when matters warrant.…”

“…In any Westminster parliament predicated on responsible government, at least moderately-strong party discipline seems a natural outgrowth of the need for the executive to maintain the confidence of the legislature. Systematic study of the extent and nature of parliamentary cohesion and partisan polarization, however, is becoming more frequent (Godbout and Høyland, 2011, 2013, 2017), with evidence of intensifying partisan sorting and left–right polarization in many democracies (Cochrane, 2015; Kevins and Soroka, 2018). At times, the findings reinforce the perception of a highly disciplined parliamentary party system (Grenier, 2017).…”