Pre-parliamentary party career and political representation

Abstract

Members of parliament are accountable to both their district and party. Consequently, they have to balance their responsiveness to these competing principals when their preferences diverge. Existing research on this representational dilemma focuses mostly on the role of political institutions, whereas this article offers a new individual-level explanation: pre-parliamentary party careers. Using sequence analysis, three ideal-typical pre-parliamentary career paths are identified: the party local, the party functionary, and the party civilian. The share of party locals increases over time at the expense of party civilians in the Danish parliament, and these party locals are more likely to diverge from the party’s position when it is unpopular among their constituents. These findings corroborate existing evidence of political professionalisation in parliamentary democracies, but they also suggest that professionalisation may be associated with a localisation of politics leading to more rather than less constituency representation.     

Is there a friends-and-neighbors effect for party leaders?

The friends-and-neighbors effect, which refers to voters' tendency to support politicians near hometown areas, has not yet been tested systematically for party leaders. Linking a built-for-purpose dataset on 266 leaders to a sample of 380,208 voters from 50 country elections in 19 parliamentary democracies drawn from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project, this article examines the effect of party leaders' local proximity on voters' leader evaluations and voting intentions. I hypothesize that leaders receive more positive evaluations and electoral support from voters in the district where they run for election. The results show that shared district increases voters' sympathy for leaders and their inclination to vote for the party of ‘near’ leaders. While the location of party leaders affects voters in all electoral systems, I find that the friends-and-neighbors effect on leader evaluations and party vote choice is stronger in systems with personalized, preferential and combined ballots.     

All Votes are Equal? Significant Legislation and Party Competition in the Danish Folketing

In nearly all studies on legislative party competition, all votes are treated equally. It is argued in this article that the cooperation between parties varies substantively depending on the type of legislation analysed. However, establishing a measure of the relative significance of votes has challenged legislative studies for decades. A novel measure for legislative significance is therefore proposed: length of debate. Using parliamentary votes from 23 legislative periods in the Danish parliament from 1953 to 2003 and debate length as measurement for bill significance, analyses are presented that focus on between‐party voting patterns on significant and non‐significant legislation and the presence, extent and features of legislative cartels is discussed. The results suggest that looking only at significant legislation reveals more clearly the legislative cartels within the legislature. These findings challenge the traditional assumption of treating parliamentary votes equally, and they allow for a better understanding of legislative cartels in the Folketing.     

Constituency Demands and Limited Supplies: Comparing Personal Issue Emphases in Co‐sponsorship of Bills and Legislative Speech

Parliamentary party groups typically comprise members of parliament (MPs) with diverse preferences and different personal issue emphases. At the same time, speaking in plenary debates is a scarce resource controlled and allocated by parliamentary party group leaders. This has led recent research to investigate how speakers for plenary debates are selected. This contribution connects with this literature by asking whether MPs’ personal issue emphases deviate from their parliamentary party groups’ issue emphases. In order to answer this question, the issue emphases which individual MPs devote to a set of issues in an open access parliamentary instrument is measured and compared to the emphases MPs devote to these issues in speeches. The results for the 2005–9 legislative period of the Norwegian Storting indicate that MPs differ in how closely aligned their issue emphases are in these two instruments and that these differences vary in a way consistent with theories on candidate selection and individualized MP behaviour.     

The electoral connection in Australia: Candidate roles,campaign activity,and the popular vote

Studies of representational roles usually examine elected representatives rather than election candidates and make little attempt to link roles with either behavior or the popular vote that candidates attract. In this paper, we use 1990 Australian data to examine all major party election candidates, and show that candidates identify with three types of representational roles:locals, who focus on articulating local concerns and interests;partisans, who see their role in party political terms; andlegislators, who emphasize the parliamentary role of an elected representative. Incumbents, especially party leaders, focus on the partisan role. Candidates in each of these three types have different views of the qualities that a candidate should possess and emphasize different forms of campaign activity. In turn, these roles have a modest impact on the popular vote that candidates attract, net of other factors. In Australia, incumbents rely on national partisan forces for reelection, while challengers rely much more on their own efforts.     

India: Searching for a Consensus by Amending the Constitution?

Two major themes have dominated the debate over India's constitutional destiny since the 1980s: parliamentary versus presidential government and federalization of its predominantly parliamentary system. India will do well to continue with its parliamentary form of government. Besides familiarity with it through British colonial experience and practice for nearly half a century, India's social diversity and fragile democracy are better served by a “collective” parliamentary/cabinet system than a “singular” presidential one. The latter may prematurely centralize the system and promote executive aggrandizement and adventurism. But India's continental diversity and complexity cannot be adequately represented solely along the parliamentary axis; they require the additional — and more vigorous — federal axis for democratic accommodation and national integration. The impact on India's parliamentary/federal system of the changing nature of the party system and premiership styles is also analyzed. Six phases of party system evolution are identified: (1) predominant party system-I (1952–1969); (2) multi-party system-I (1969–1971); (3) predominant party system-II (1971–1977); (4) two-party system (1977–1984); (5) (a stillborn) predominant party system-Ill (1984–1989); and (6) multi-party system-II (1989–to date). Three styles of prime ministerial leadership are delineated: (1) pluralist, (2) patrimonial, and (3) federal. Federal forces and features of the political system were generally accentuated when the party system was not a one-party dominant one and the prime ministerial leadership was not a patrimonial one. Some viable constitutional amendments designed to promote federalization are considered. The two particularly promising avenues of federalization that combine “responsible federalism” with “responsible parliamentary government” are those that establish a series of autonomous federal instrumentalities recommended by the Sarkaria Commission and create a President-in-Council interlocked with the Inter-Governmental Council that takes away the power of proclaiming president's rule in a state from the federal Home Ministry.     

Parliament without Government: The Belgian Parliament and the Government Formation Processes of 2007–2011

Parliamentary systems are characterised by strong links between the executive and the legislature. While the importance of executive–legislative relationships is well-known, the extent to which executive dominance affects parliamentary behaviour is hard to grasp. This study uses the recent institutional crises in Belgium to study parliamentary behaviour in the absence of a government with full powers. Cabinet formation in Belgium has proved to be protracted in recent years, leading to long periods of government formation in both 2007–2008 and 2010–2011. Such circumstances provide a unique comparison between normal situations of parliament in the presence of government, and exceptional situations of prolonged periods of caretaker government. In particular the article looks at three aspects of parliamentary behaviour that are usually linked to executive–legislative relations: legislative initiatives, voting behaviour and party unity. The general hypothesis is that prolonged periods of government formation gave parliamentarians more opportunities to influence the legislative process and more (ideological) freedom. The results show a nuanced picture: parliament became more pro-active, the salience of the government–opposition divide declined, while party unity remained as strong as ever. It is concluded that government formation processes did not lead to drastic changes in the legislative–executive relationship, but rather permitted a modest correction to the extremely weak position of parliament.     

Four worlds of morality politics: the impact of institutional venues and party cleavages

The most prominent theory accounting for variation of morality politics across Western Europe is the so-called Two Worlds framework. According to this approach, the presence or absence of a secular?religious cleavage in national party systems strongly affects the degree of conflict intensity and the framing of morality policy issues. This article shows that the explanatory power of the Two Worlds model could be enhanced significantly by introducing a second analytical dimension that captures the institutional venue (party politics vs. parliamentary politics), in which moral conflicts take place. This is useful because there are instances in which a religious cleavage is lacking, but moral conflicts are nonetheless highly intense and party-based (the traditionalist world), and there are cases in which the religious cleavage formally exists, but moral conflicts are nonetheless resolved in the parliamentary arena (the unsecular world).     

Gaining new insights by going local: determinants of coalition formation in mixed democratic polities

We develop a simple spatial model suggesting that Members of Parliament strive for the inclusion of the head of state’s party in coalitions formed in mixed democratic polities, and that parliamentary parties try to assemble coalitions that minimize the ideological distance to the head of state. We identify the German local level of government as functionally equivalent to a parliamentary setting, such that the directly elected mayor has competencies similar to a president in a mixed national polity. Our findings show that the party affiliation of the head of state is a key factor considered by party members in the legislature when forming coalitions: coalitions in the legislature are more likely to form if they include the party of the head of the executive branch. Furthermore, the policy preferences of the head of the executive branch matter for the legislators’ behavior in the coalition formation process: the smaller the ideological distance between the position of a coalition and the position of the head of state, the more likely a coalition is to be formed.     

Radical Moderation: Recapturing Power in Two‐Party Parliamentary Systems

We estimate the parameters of a reputational game of political competition using data from five two‐party parliamentary systems. We find that latent party preferences (and party reputations) persist with high probability across election periods, with one exception: parties with extreme preferences who find themselves out of power switch to moderation with higher probability than the equivalent estimated likelihood for parties in government (extreme or moderate) or for moderate parties in opposition. We find evidence for the presence of significant country‐specific differences. We subject the model to a battery of goodness‐of‐fit tests and contrast model predictions with survey and vote margin data not used for estimation. Finally, according to the estimated model parameters, Australia is less than half as likely to experience extreme policies and Australian governments can expect to win more consecutive elections in the long run as compared to their counterparts in Greece, Malta, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.     

The Renewal of the Local Conservative Party Campaign Capability: An Organizational Insight into Central Co-ordination

The importance of local campaigning for general election success is widely accepted. By focusing on the British Conservative Party, this article offers qualitative support through a research design in which interviews were conducted with local activists in four target constituencies and with regional officials; as a result, some understanding of the long campaign was also obtained. Embracing the contemporary view that campaigning effectiveness is a function of the party centre's ability to direct local parties, this study provides an organizational insight into how the centre was able to enhance its control, but also discusses the implications of this for local activists and for the local party organizational structure. The findings reveal that activist de-politicization and de-skilling, and a more formal and dismissive approach to party management, have undermined the local effort with the result that the party's local campaigning effort remains organizationally sub-optimal. The engagement of outside expertise and supporter networks has also changed the nature of the local party, so that it is moving towards a network of local political capabilities.     

The ‘Hows’, not the ‘Whys’ or the ‘Wherefores’: The Role of Intra‐party Competition in the 2011 Breakthrough of the True Finns

From minor party status, the True Finn Party (PS) claimed nearly one‐fifth of the vote and almost the same proportion of parliamentary seats at the April 2011 Finnish general election. It registered the largest gains made by any party in postwar Finnish history, thus writing – in the eyes of foreign journalists at least – yet another chapter in the surge of populist radical right parties across contemporary Europe. This article, however, is concerned more with how the substantial PS vote was mobilised than with how much was mobilised. The idea is not to identify the primary causes of the PS's national breakthrough, but to explore the internal dynamics of party's explosive growth and the process of translating a large prospective vote into ‘hard votes’ through the ballot boxes. The focus is on district‐level nomination strategies, the range of candidate types, the mechanics of vote optimisation and the distribution of the personal vote. With regard to the latter, the article seeks to measure and analyse the role of intra‐party competition in the anatomy of party transformation and to do so by the novel means of adapting the Laakso‐Taagepera index to measure the ‘effective number of co‐partisans’. Significantly, at the 2011 Eduskunta election the PS exhibited the highest level of intra‐party competition of any of the eight parliamentary parties.     

Perceptions of Partisan Ideologies: The Effect of Coalition Participation

Recent scholarship in comparative political behavior has begun to address how voters in coalitional systems manage the complexity of those environments. We contribute to this emerging literature by asking how voters update their perceptions of the policy positions of political parties that participate in coalition cabinets. In contrast to previous work on the sources of voter perceptions of party ideology in parliamentary systems, which has asked how voters respond to changes in party manifestos (i.e., promises), we argue that in updating their perceptions, voters will give more weight to observable actions than to promises. Further, coalition participation is an easily observed party action that voters use as a heuristic to infer the direction of policy change in the absence of detailed information about parties’ legislative records. Specifically, we propose that all voters should perceive parties in coalition cabinets as more ideologically similar, but that this tendency will be muted for more politically interested voters (who have greater access to countervailing messages from parties). Using an individual‐level data set constructed from 54 electoral surveys in 18 European countries, we find robust support for these propositions.     

Australian MPs and the Internet: Avoiding the Digital Age?1

New media technologies, such as the internet and email, have been seen as providing opportunities to reinvigorate representative democracy and parliamentary institutions. This article examines the use of new technologies by Australian Members of Parliament (MPs). It looks at the growth and function of MPs' websites and assesses how far such technologies might facilitate changes in their electorate, party and parliamentary roles. We analyse what factors persuade MPs to move online and how they then use the technologies. The results indicate that while websites amongst legislators are growing, they are used primarily as supplementary, administrative tools. Overall, technological innovation in the Australian Parliament is still relatively rare and it appears there are systemic barriers that limit the potential of information communication technologies (ICTs) in the representative process.     

Centripetal and Centrifugal Incentives under Different Electoral Systems

In a seminal article, Cox (1990) suggested that electoral systems with larger district magnitudes provide incentives for parties to advocate more extreme policy positions. In this article, we put this proposition to the test. Informed by recent advances in spatial models of party competition, we introduce a design that embeds the effect of electoral rules in the utility function of voters. We then estimate the equilibrium location of parties as the weight voters attach to the expected distribution of seats and votes changes. Our model predicts that electoral rules affect large and small parties in different ways. We find centripetal effects only for parties that are favorably biased by electoral rules. By contrast, smaller parties see their vote share decline and are pushed toward more extreme equilibrium positions. Evidence from 13 parliamentary democracies supports model predictions. Along with testing the incentives provided by electoral rules, results carry implications for the strategies of vote‐maximizing parties and for the role of small parties in multiparty competition.     

How Michael Foot Won the Labour Party Leadership

This paper examines the voting motivations of Labour parliamentarians in the final parliamentary ballot of the Labour party leadership election of 1980. By constructing a data set of the voting behaviour of Labour parliamentarians and by determining the ideological disposition of the 1980 parliamentary Labour party (PLP) this paper examines the ideological disposition of the candidates' vis‐à‐vis their electorate, and offers a challenge to traditional interpretations of how and why Foot was elected. The traditional interpretation has sought for explanations as to how a right‐wing dominated PLP elected a left‐wing candidate. Whilst citing the traditional interpretations of the impact of the impending Electoral College, mandatory reselection and the assumed weaknesses of the Healey campaign, this paper argues that there was considerably more left‐wing sentiment within the 1980 PLP in terms of economic management, defence and the Common Market, than previously considered. As such this paper suggests that, taken with the impact of the other factors, the victory of Foot should not be seen as that surprising.     

Kavanagh and Mckenzie on power

This article responds to an earlier analysis by Kavanagh which criticised the basic thesis of McKenzie's British Political Parties. The author of the present article believes that Kavanagh made some important criticisms of McKenzie, but it is still true that power in the Labour Party is similarly distributed to power in the Conservative Party ‐ broadly the parliamentary party is autonomous, and the Leader, especially in government, is in control of the party. Events since 1983 have served to underline this fact.     

The search for the centre: Pivot parties in West European party systems

The central question is whether or not in multiparty systems the so‐called parties of the ‘centre’ can be defined and observed in isolation. We start from the assumption that party‐life in the centre‐space of a political system has distinctive features. Centre parties must therefore be conceptualised and analysed as phenomena sui generis and do not belong to either the left‐wing or the right‐wing of a party system. The second assumption is that every party in a parliamentary democracy is a vote seeking and policy guided actor. This means that a centre party depends on its capacity to compete with both ‘wings’ of a party system whilst occupying the centre‐space. It is then capable of becoming the ‘pivot’ of the system: its ‘centrality’ and ‘dominance’ represent ideological distinctiveness and electoral/legislative weight. The cross‐national analysis demonstrates that only a few parties are genuine pivot parties. The paper concludes with a discussion about the issue whether or not the existence of a pivot party is a blessing in disguise for the working of a democracy.