Parliamentary Discipline Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

As purposive political actors, legislators or members of parliaments in democratic legislatures typically join and work within political parties. To talk about parliamentary discipline is then to talk about parliamentary party discipline. Parties offer legislators the possibility of structured collective action with like-minded copartisans, identification with a brand name that can enhance their electoral prospects, and access to potentially significant legislative resources (e.g., promotion to committee and leadership positions, patronage, etc.). For their part, political parties are meaningless entities unless they act collectively with reasonably well-defined policy and electoral goals, organize the legislature or parliament, and behave cohesively in the electoral and legislative arenas to promote their brand and interact with the executive or government. In parliamentary systems—where executive and legislative powers are fused—single or multiparty governments cannot survive without disciplined parties; in presidential or separated systems, presidents’ bases of legislative support become less stable when legislative parties are not cohesive.

While most legislative scholars view “party” as crucial to understanding legislative politics, some dissent. Most notably, Keith Krehbiel insists that party cannot be disentangled conceptually and empirically from legislators’ preferences, because party cohesion or discipline is nothing more than preference ship within the host chamber. Krehbiel’s trenchant critique has, however, not been generally accepted by most legislative scholars who see legislators agreeing with one another either because of shared policy preferences (cohesion) or as a result of persuasion or coercion (discipline), although in practice the effects of cohesion and discipline are indistinguishable.

Legislative Party Cohesion As Shared Policy Preferences

Those who interpret intraparty legislative or parliamentary cohesion primarily as shared policy values and preferences emphasize the influence of copartisans’ prior ideological convictions, emotional loyalties, party solidarity, socialization, and moral commitments. Thus, studies demonstrate that even when legislative parties are not subject to tight discipline— as on many free or conscience issues—intraparty cohesion and interparty positions are underpinned by shared policy preferences. Other studies point to the reinforcing impact of common party nomination and selection processes, and legislative leaders’ activities in promoting shared values and preferences in many legislatures. However, conversely, in the national legislatures of Italy, Japan, or the United States, electoral mechanisms and the parity of central party campaign resources combine with the reelection motive to discourage legislators from cohering ideologically and identifying strongly with a national party.

Party Discipline As A Consequence Of Leadership Intervention

When legislative party members do not gel on a specific issue, legislative leaders or whips in a democratic legislature—and especially, majority party or coalition leaders—resort to strategic incentives and coercion to reach intraparty accommodations that keep the party together and facilitate promotion of the party’s brand and collective goals. They use their tactical skills to structure debate by emphasizing specific votes and political messages that tap copartisans’ shared values and preferences; buy off dissidents; limit policy side payments (e.g., pork barrel, regulatory relief, or special executive interventions); truncate legislative deliberations through control of parliamentary timetables, special rules, and votes of confidence; reward loyalty and punish disloyalty through preferential distribution of significant political resources (e.g., committee assignments, executive positions); or insist on casting all party votes for their party. These strategies and tactics, however, are not bound to succeed. Achieving legislative party discipline may be impossible; if cohesion is irreparable, invoking discipline becomes too risky and, therefore, unenforceable, as, for example, in the Italian Camera dei Deputati in the late 1990s, when the imposition of discipline was always qualified by the real risk that legislators would quit their parties if discipline were too strict. Only where the ideological, cultural, or pragmatic basis exists for constructing a winning intraparty coalition will copartisans be willing to grant their leaders disciplinary powers to promote the party’s collective interests.

Legislative parties create disciplinary regimes of varying strengths across systems and time. These range from strong systems, where legislators are expelled from the party (e.g., the postcommunist Polish Sjem) or dissent is suppressed when issues threaten party unity or generate discomfort for the government (e.g., the African National Congress [ANC] in the National Assembly of South Africa), to weak ones, where sanctions are rarely imposed effectively, as in the U.S. Senate and the Brazilian Câmara dos Deputados and Senado. Between these poles lie most other systems. But, even where fairly strong disciplinary powers are available, as in the British House of Commons, the degree to which they are invoked and are effective depends on the specific policy issue and other situational factors, including the position of the opposition parties.

Identifying And Measuring Legislative Party Unity

Most studies of legislative party unity analyze single legislatures or, as in the United States, rely almost exclusively on analysis of roll call votes. In consequence, the disparate findings derived from analyzing different legislatures—exhibiting diverse rules and decision-making styles, technology, patterns of legislative organization, and party competitiveness—are often difficult to reconcile or synthesize. Regardless of methodological difficulties, the overwhelming body of research on legislative party unity shows that most legislators in most democratic legislatures accept the benefits of joining and organizing legislative parties, and most cohere strongly with their copartisans. The most prominent outliers are the national legislatures of Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Estonia, Guatemala, Honduras, France (1945–1968), Italy, Japan, the United States, and Uruguay.

Explaining Varying Levels Of Legislative Party Unity

Comparative analyses show that the incidence of legislators sticking with their parties is related to their strategic environment, which includes the nature and structure of their national political and party system, electoral rules, and party leaders’ control over access to and orderings on ballots. Simply being part of a parliamentary system, which ostensibly requires disciplined governing parties to facilitate enactment of their program, patronage, and sustaining the government in office, does not necessarily induce greater legislative party unity than in presidential or separated systems, which purportedly generate fewer incentives to value collective party goods or provide legislative support for the executive. Similarly, being part of a federal system does not necessarily depress unity levels, as studies on Australia, Canada, or Germany demonstrate. Much more critical is where, and to what extent, different political actors exercise veto power over decision-making processes and policy choices, and how executives in both parliamentary and presidential or separated systems encourage intraparty discipline through policy appeals, pork barrel, patronage, and other resources that are highly valued by legislators in pursuit of their goals.

Party level and situational factors also account for variations in unity levels both across and within systems. Some parties are less unified than others but neither the ideological complexion of a party, whether or not it is a majority or governing party or coalition, nor the size of a party or coalition’s majority in the legislative chamber is apparently significant. However, highly salient issues to the electorate, and important to a party or coalition or different groups of constituents, tend to generate high levels of intraparty unity. When, as well as which, issues reach the agenda is also important.

Bibliography:

Aldrich, John H. Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Party Politics in America. Chicago:The University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Arter, David, ed. Comparing and Classifying Legislatures. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Bowler, Shaun. “Parties in Legislatures: Two Competing Explanations.” In Parties Without Partisan, edited by Russell J. Dalton and Martin P. Wattenberg, 157–179. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Carey, John M. “Competing Principals, Political Institutions, and Party Unity in Legislative Voting.” American Journal of Political Science 51, no. 1 (2007): 92–107.
Cox, Gary W., and Mathew D. McCubbins. Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Hazan, Reuven Y. “Does Cohesion Equal Discipline? Towards a Conceptual Delineation.” The Journal of Legislative Studies 10, no. 1 (2003): 1–11.
Kam, Christopher. “Do Ideological Differences Explain Parliamentary Behaviour? Evidence from Great Britain and Canada.” The Journal of Legislative Studies 7, no. 4 (2001): 89–126.
Laver, Michael, and Kenneth A. Shepsle. “How Political Parties Emerged from the Primeval Slime: Party Cohesion, Party Discipline, and the Formation of Governments.” In Party Discipline and Parliamentary Government, edited by Shaun Bowler, David M. Farrell, and Richard S. Katz, 23–48. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999.
Owens, John E. “Explaining Party Cohesion and Discipline in Democratic Legislatures: Purposiveness and Contexts.” The Journal of Legislative Studies 10, no. 1 (2003): 12–40.
Özbudun, Ergun. Party Cohesion in Western Democracies: A Causal Analysis. Sage Professional Papers in Comparative Politics 01-006. Beverley Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1970.
Strøm, Kaare. Minority Government and Majority Rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Tsebelis, George. Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

This example Parliamentary Discipline Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.