Caroline Close

Parliamentary party loyalty and party family: the missing link?

Party cohesion is a crucial aspect of parliamentary systems, and it varies across time, parties and systems. To explain these variations, scholars have set forth the influence of macro-level and individual-level factors. Although party-level factors have also been considered, the role of party family has been overlooked. This research seeks to fill this gap. To this end, I focus on one dimension of cohesion: the extent to which legislators have internalized the norm of party loyalty. The concept of party family permits to investigate the effect of party origin and party ideology beyond a policy-based approach and left-right dimension. Using attitudinal data of 829 parliamentarians elected in 14 European national assemblies, the analysis uncovers a party family effect, particularly in the green and radical right parties. The results suggest that a greater attention should be directed towards party family as a determinant factor of legislative cohesion.

Preferences and agreement in legislative parties: testing the causal chain

ABSTRACT This research note focuses on two specific dimensions of legislative cohesion: the homogeneity of preferences within a party and party agreement. Although these two dimensions have often been considered as synonyms, it is argued that these two concepts refer to different realities. The authors therefore develop distinct measurements for these two concepts. The authors then examine their statistical relationship, putting to the test the widespread assumption that heterogeneous preferences increase the probability of disagreement. The authors do so by testing the effect of different measures of a member of parliament’s ideological distance to her/his party on her/his self-reported frequency of disagreement with her/his party. It is demonstrated that the causal chain linking both concepts is only verified in the case of a conscious ideological distance. The results have crucial theoretical and methodological implications for future research on party cohesion and party unity.

What Citizens Want in Terms of Intra-Party Democracy: Popular Attitudes towards Alternative Candidate Selection Procedures:

Reforms of intra-party decision-making processes often rest on the idea that citizens want more direct say in these processes, but empirical data to support this claim are scarce. Using original data from the 2014 PartiRep voter survey in Belgium, this article explores the extent to which citizens support alternative intra-party processes. It shows that voters have heterogeneous preferences in terms of candidate selection procedures and that these are not random. ‘Disaffected’ citizens tend to support open procedures, whereas critical citizens tend to prefer closed selectorates, that is, intra-party actors. It also finds that voters’ preferences for intra-party models of democracy match their preferences for models of democracy at the system level. Our findings confirm that citizens do have clear preferences for how parties should organise and that these match their general views on how democracy should work.

Changing Democracy? Why Inertia is Winning Over Innovation

There is a widespread belief that in order to cure the so-called crisis of democracy, citizens’ involvement in decision-making processes needs to be fostered. However, despite the fact that there is a move towards more inclusive institutions in Europe, changes implementing democratic innovations at the national level remain rare. Why are democratic innovations not implemented more often? In this article, we provide explanations on why inertia seems to win over change through an analysis of party elites’ willingness to enact democratic innovations across 15 European democracies, by using the PartiRep Comparative MP Survey. This research concentrates on party-level factors: party age, time in government and party ideology. Findings suggest that institutional inertia is partially rooted on the fact that party elites’ support for democratic innovations is heavily related to anti-establishment parties, to left-wing parties and to parties with limited access to power.

Morality politics in the European parliament. A qualitative insight into MEPs’ voting behaviour on abortion and human embryonic stem cell research

ABSTRACT The literature on morality politics is well-documented, but has mostly taken place at the national level. Yet, morality politics increasingly appears on the European Parliament’s agenda. Abortion has been tackled through parliamentary reports on sexual and reproductive health and rights; while human embryonic stem cell research has been dealt with through the successive European research framework programmes. Using semi-structured interviews with (former) MEPs, this research examines how the central actors involved in these parliamentary debates perceive and explain their vote on these issues. The analysis particularly focuses on the role of religion and values, and uncovers its effects at several levels: national culture, political affiliation and personal believing. In that regard, respondents emphasise the great degree of freedom that the European parliamentary arena offers to its members to express their personal values and convictions – and not exclusively on morality issues.