parliaments and legislatures series samuel c. patterson general advisory editor

315 Pages·2007·19.71 MB·English

PARLIAMENTS AND LEGISLATURES SERIES
SAMUEL C. PATTERSON
GENERAL ADVISORY EDITOR

Party Discipline and

Parliamentary Government

EDITED BY
SHAUN BOWLER,
DAVID M. FARRELL,
AND RICHARD S. KATZ
OHI O STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
COLUMBUS
Copyright © 1999 by The Ohio State University.
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Party discipline and parliamentary government / edited by Shaun Bowler,
David M. Farrell, and Richard S. Katz.
p. cm. — (Parliaments and legislatures series)
Based on papers presented at a workshop which was part of the European
Consortium for Political Research's joint sessions in France in 1995.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8142-0796-0 (cl: alk. paper). — ISBN 0-8142-5000-9 (pa : alk.
paper)
1. Party discipline—Europe, Western. 2. Political parties—Europe,
Western. 3. Legislative bodies—Europe, Western.
I. Bowler, Shaun, 1958- . II. Farrell, David M., 1960- . III. Katz,
Richard S. IV. European Consortium for Political Research. V. Series.
JN94.A979P376 1998
328.3/75/094—dc21 98-11722
CIP
Text design by Nighthawk Design.
Type set in Times New Roman by Graphic Composition, Inc.
Printed by Bookcrafters, Inc..
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

Foreword vii
Preface ix
Part I: Theories and Definitions
1 Party Cohesion, Party Discipline, and Parliaments 3
Shaun Bowler, David M. Farrell, and Richard S. Katz
2 How Political Parties Emerged from the Primeval
Slime: Party Cohesion, Party Discipline, and the
Formation of Governments 23
Michael Laver and Kenneth A. Shepsle
Part II: The "Westminster Model"
3 Discipline in the British Conservative Party: The
Attitudes of Party Activists toward the Role of
Their Members of Parliament 53
Paul F. Whiteley and Patrick Seyd
4 Backbenchers with Attitude: A Seismic Study of
the Conservative Party and Dissent on Europe 72
David Baker, Andrew Gamble, Steve Ludlam, and
David Seawright
Part III: Established Continental European Systems
5 Cohesion of Party Groups and Interparty Conflict
in the Swiss Parliament: Roll Call Voting in the
National Council 99
Prisca Lanfranchi and Ruth Liithi
vi • Contents
6 Electoral Systems, Parliamentary Committees, and
Party Discipline: The Norwegian Storting in a
Comparative Perspective 121
Bj0rn Erik Rasch
7 Parliamentary Party Discipline in Spain 141
Manuel Sanchez de Dios
Part IV: Newly Emerging Systems
8 The Parliamentarization of the East Central
European Parties: Party Discipline in the
Hungarian Parliament, 1990-1996 167
Attila Agh
9 The Challenge of Diversity: Party Cohesion in the
European Parliament 189
Tapio Raunio
10 Parties and Party Discipline within the European
Parliament: A Norms-Based Approach 208
Shaun Bowler and David M. Farrell
Part V: Parliamentary Discipline and Coalition Governments
11 The Costs of Coalition: A Five-Nation Comparison 227
Carol Mershon
12 Coalition Discipline, Enforcement Mechanisms,
and Intraparty Politics 269
Paul Mitchell
Contributors 289
Index 291
Foreword
Party Discipline and Parliamentary Government brings together empiri­
cal studies of the internal cohesiveness of political party groups in Euro­
pean parliaments, along with the leadership behavior that conduces to
disciplined parties in parliament. The purview of these studies includes
parliamentary party behavior in Great Britain, Ireland, Switzerland,
Norway, Spain, Hungary, and the European Parliament, with less exten­
sive inclusion of parliamentary behavior in a number of other countries.
The original papers upon which these chapters are based were first ex­
posed to the public view in a workshop, "Party Discipline and the Or­
ganization of Parliaments," that Shaun Bowler and David Farrell
organized for the European Consortium for Political Research meetings
in Bordeaux, France, in 1995.
Students of American legislative politics are highly sensitive to the
fact that the U.S. Congress and the state legislatures often do not exhibit
party discipline in their voting behavior: members of the legislative
party do not vote against members of the other party a very high pro­
portion of the time. Party government is not a preponderant feature
of American legislative decision making. Although party voting is by
no means insignificant or trivial in American legislatures, it plays a
far more important role in the parliamentary parties in European
assemblies.
Central as party discipline and cohesion are to the performance of
many European parliaments, the phenomena have not been investigated
extensively. The studies in this anthology take a very large leap forward
in knowledge about parliamentary party discipline. Because the parlia­
mentary cohesiveness of the governing majority may be a coalition of
several party groups, the joint problems of cohesiveness and discipline
in multiparty parliaments are intriguing and fertile. More broadly, these
careful and cogent studies contribute to better understanding of the na­
ture of legislature or parliamentary politics altogether.
In the American context, legislative parties may contribute primarily
by addressing the policy or status preferences of their members, by sup­
vn
viii -Foreword
porting a legislative program either on ideological grounds or for the
purpose of facilitating reelection of their members and leaders, or both.
In European parliamentary systems, the legislative assembly has as its
preeminent function the formation of a majority coalition—composed
of one large party or several smaller ones—sufficient to establish and
support a government. Accordingly, party discipline plays a signifi­
cantly different role in the parliamentary systems than in separated sys­
tems such as that of the United States, where the executive is chosen
quite independently of the legislature.
The studies in this book are illuminating. These authors move away
from a crude consideration of parliamentary parties as unitary actors
to investigate what goes on inside them in terms of the formation of
intraparty consensus and leadership support. The true policy prefer­
ences and attitudes of the MPs may, for instance, be belied by an analy­
sis operating only at the party level, as illustrated by the views of the
British MPs toward the Maastricht Treaty. Even the less well-under-
stood continental European parliaments exhibit very high, although
varying, levels of parliamentary party cohesiveness. Indeed, some par­
liamentary parties harbor more loyal, better disciplined members than
others. Moreover, national parliamentary parties are, in turn, nested in
a transnational assembly, the European Parliament. These fascinating
variations are investigated in innovative ways in the following chapters.
Samuel C. Patterson
Preface
This book emerged from a series of papers presented at a workshop,
"Party Discipline and the Organization of Parliaments " held during the
Joint Sessions of the European Consortium for Political Research, at
the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Bordeaux, France, April 27-May 2,
1995. During the course offive days of stimulating discussion, it became
clear to all of us around the table that there was a crying need for a
comparative study on this important subject. It was agreed that the
workshop organizers (Bowler and Farrell), together with the most force­
ful of the participants (Katz), should try to pull a selection of the papers
together as an edited volume. As always happens with such exercises,
we could not include all of the papers presented in the workshop, either
because they were already committed elsewhere or because their subject
matter did not quite fit the overriding theme of the book. But this does
not take from the fact that each of these colleagues played a vital role
in seeing this project come to fruition and we want to record a special
thanks to them: Herbert Doring, John Huber, Stephen Ingle, Robin Ko­
lodny, Petr Kopecky, Lia Nijzink, Kaare Stem, Marc van den Muy­
zenberg, Ania van der Meer-Krok-Paszkowska, and Matti Wiberg.
Given the transatlantic dispersion of the authors and editors, the
relative speedy completion of this volume is testimony to the wonders
of e-mail, but more especially to the conscientiousness of our authors.
Final completion was facilitated by David Farrell's stay at Harvard, in
the first part of 1997, as a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press,
Politics, and Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government. We are
grateful to Samuel Patterson for his advice and support throughout, to
our reader for very helpful feedback and advice that helped to improve
the manuscripts, and most especially to Charlotte Dihoff, Beth Ina, and
the rest of the staff at Ohio State University Press.
IX