Helene Helboe Pedersen

How intra-party power relations affect the coalition behaviour of political parties:

This article examines the impact of intra-party politics on the coalition behaviour of political parties. The policy-seeking model of party behaviour is refined by differentiating between policy purity and policy influence, arguing that the distribution of power within political parties affects how inclined they are to abandon policy ideals to participate in coalitions and thereby gain influence on policy. Three contradictory hypotheses are tested in a multivariate analysis based on the legislative coalition behaviour of 11 Danish parties from 1953 to 2004. The analysis shows that, among parties close to the government in policy terms, those dominated by the parliamentary party group more frequently enter binding legislative coalitions than do parties dominated by their national party organization. This implies that the ability of parties to convert parliamentary representation into actual influence on parliamentary decisions is conditioned by their internal distribution of power.

Who Gives Evidence to Parliamentary Committees? A Comparative Investigation of Parliamentary Committees and their Constituencies

This article focuses on the interaction between parliamentary committees and external actors. How is the interaction organised, and how does it influence which interests are voiced? The authors show that institutional variation in procedures for calling witnesses and variation in committee agendas influence both the composition of actors and the concentration of evidence. By composition of actors, they refer to the set of different actor types involved. By evidence concentration, they refer to the extent to which evidence is provided by a relatively small share of active actors. The study is based on a new data set of all contacts between parliamentary committees and external actors in one year across three countries: the United Kingdom, Denmark and the Netherlands. Interestingly, the findings show that procedures of invitation rather than open calls increase the diversity of actor composition and decrease the concentration of actor evidence. This, however, comes at a cost, since the overall volume of contacts is reduced.

Is measuring interest group influence a mission impossible|[quest]| The case of interest group influence in the Danish parliament

Executive SummaryThe question of interest groups influence is fundamental to our understanding and evaluation of political systems and processes. The definition and measurement of influence is however one of the most serious challenges to empirical studies of interest groups. Some argue that it is a mission impossible to observe the diffuse concept of influence. Nevertheless, more innovative methods have been developed to manage this challenge, but we do not know to what extent these different measurement methods agree, and therefore to what extent we can compare different studies and accumulate knowledge about which groups are influential and why. This article argues that, if different measures of influence correlate, we can have more faith in our measures and perhaps by triangulation come even closer to measuring at least important aspects of interest group influence. Therefore, the article is set out to test measurement agreement across different measures of interest groups’ influence. It focuses on studies of many cases (large-N studies) and uses measures based on (i) survey data and (ii) documentary data. The Danish Parliament is the empirical setting of the study. First, the article reviews different definitions of influence and outlines the definition of this study. Here, influence is understood as control over political outputs, such as bills or parliamentary debates. Second, the article discusses strengths and weaknesses of different measures of influence. Survey data can illuminate informal venues of influence but may be biased by strategic replies from the interest groups. Documentary data can track the impact of group activity on political outputs in a more unbiased manner but can only uncover formal venues of influence. Put together, these indicators may provide a more valid measure of influence. This, however, requires the indicators to correlate. The article tests the agreement between these two sources of data across three different measures: (i) group activity; (ii) agenda-setting influence; and (iii) legislative influence. Agreement is strongest with relation to activities and weakest with relation to legislative influence, which was also expected. In general, the analyses show that even though measurement agreement is low, it is promising for future studies that different measures of influence are strongly and significantly correlated. The article finds no clear indications of some group types being less ‘honest’ in their responses. We do not need to be very suspicious towards specific categories of groups, such as business for instance. The article does obtain results indicating that the formulation of response categories is very important to the answers we obtain and also important to the agreement between survey and documentary data. These findings implicate that measuring – aspects – of influence is not necessarily a mission impossible. As different measures correlate, we can compare different studies and thereby arrive at more general conclusions, and we may improve our studies by combining more measures of influence and also by paying even more attention to the design of the surveys we use.

Minority coalition governance in Denmark

Coalition governance is a challenge for political parties because it involves cooperation and compromises between parties that have different political goals and are competitors in political elections. Coalition coordination is crucial for the intra-coalitional cooperation of the governing parties. A key element in coalition coordination is coalition agreements, which to a varying degree constrain the behaviour of the coalition partners. This article explores the share of laws that were precisely defined in government agreements and/or legislative agreements, and sets out to explain variation in this share of coalition agreement-based laws. The analyses are based on unique data on legislative as well as governmental coalition agreements entered by three Danish governments with varying parliamentary strength. This study brings the blooming literature on coalition agreements one step further by showing that coalition governance is influenced by government strength. The legislative practice of strong coalition governments is less accommodative but more pre-regulated by coalition agreements.

What do Parties Want? Policy versus Office

What parties want – policy, office or votes – affects how they represent their voters, make strategic decisions and respond to external changes in society. What parties strive to accomplish is crucially important for what they do. Moreover, our knowledge of what parties want affects what we expect them to do. For instance, coalition theory assumes that parties have homogeneous goals, and hence are equally likely to join coalitions given the same circumstances. However, this article investigates this basic assumption of party goal homogeneity and finds that party goals do indeed diverge. The article demonstrates that party goals are influenced by party-specific factors such as party size, policy position and intra-party politics. It therefore suggests, further, that intra-party politics should be included more systematically in future studies of party behaviour.

Policy-seeking parties in multiparty systems: Influence or purity?

According to the standard policy-seeking model of party behaviour, a party should always want to join a coalition if its inclusion would decrease the policy distance between the party and the winning coalition. However, in multiparty systems where no party has a majority, policy influence always comes at a cost to the party’s preferred policy. A party has to moderate its own policy principles in order to join winning coalitions and influence public policy. Based on data from 14 Danish parties from 1971 to 2005, this article shows that the policy-seeking behaviour of political parties is affected by the organizational constraints a party poses on its representatives in parliament. Parties strongly constrained by the party organization tend to ask more questions and raise more interpellations in parliament than parties with weaker organizational constraints. These latter parties, on the other hand, tend to participate more frequently in winning legislative coalitions.

Differences and Changes in Danish Party Organisations: Central Party Organisation versus Parliamentary Party Group Power

The subject of this article is the relationship between the central party organisation and the parliamentary party group. The article investigates whether Danish political parties are changing into parties dominated by their parliamentary party groups, as has been hypothesised. In contrast to most of the literature on party change, which is based on ideas of convergence caused by external changes, this article argues that party organisation is basically a party decision and therefore influenced by party preferences and characteristics. The analyses are based on data from the statutes of 16 Danish parties in over 50 years. One noteworthy finding is that Danish parties do not converge. Party ideology proves to be very important for the power structure of a party. Even though political parties are exposed to changing political circumstances they still organise according to their basic ideas about democracy and representation.

The Rise of Citizen Groups? The Mobilization and Representation of Danish Interest Groups, 1975–2010

Over the last several decades, a number of societal changes can be expected to have led to the increased mobilization of interest groups representing citizen interests. For this mobilization to be effective, citizen groups need to win access to relevant political arenas. This article investigates the development of the Danish interest group system and the representation of interest groups in political arenas. While replicating findings of increasing citizen mobilization from other countries is expected, it is argued here that the development of groups’ political representation as a consequence of this mobilization depends on the dynamics of resource exchange in different political arenas. This argument is tested on a unique dataset of Danish interest groups in 1975 and 2010 which includes data on group populations and group access to the administration and the media. The analysis demonstrates that citizen groups must overcome not only the challenge of organizing, but also persistent logics guiding the inclusion of, interest groups in different political arenas. Citizen groups have been more successful in increasing their representation in the media than in the administrative arena.

Campaigning on behalf of the party? Party constraints on candidate campaign personalisation

This article analyses what makes political candidates run a party‐focused or personalised election campaign. Prior work shows that candidates face incentives from voters and the media to personalise their campaign rhetoric and promises at the expense of party policy. This has raised concerns about the capacity of parties to govern effectively and voters’ ability to hold individual politicians accountable. This article builds on the literature on party organisation and considers the possible constraints candidates face from their party in personalising their election campaigns. Specifically, it is argued that party control over the candidate nomination process and campaign financing constrains most political candidates in following electoral incentives for campaign personalisation. Using candidate survey data from the 2009 EP election campaign in 27 countries, the article shows how candidates from parties in which party officials exerted greater control over the nomination process and campaign finances were less likely to engage in personalised campaigning at the expense of the party programme. The findings imply that most parties, as central gatekeepers and resource suppliers, hold important control mechanisms for countering the electoral pressure for personalisation and advance our understanding of the incentives and constraints candidates face when communicating with voters. The article discusses how recent democratic reforms, paradoxically, might induce candidate personalisation with potential negative democratic consequences.

Catherine Moury, Coalition Government and Party Mandate: How Coalition Agreements Constrain Ministerial Action, reviewed by Helene Helboe Pedersen

cratic, too much participation at the intra-party level could result in rendering the party irrelevant. Key democratic values such as participation and representation can be realized even if the parties are not internally democratic. Schattschneider (1942: 60) was largely correct when he argued that ‘‘Democracy is not found in the parties but between the parties,’’ as was Sartori (1965: 124) who claimed that ‘‘Democracy on a large scale is not the sum of many little democracies.’’ Cross and Katz’s edited volume clearly does not give up on intra-party democracy, but it does adopt and emphasize the distinction between the separate yet associated levels of intraand inter-party democracy, and implies that we might want to limit the former in order to increase the latter. This book adds to the recent research which opposes the imposition of internal democracy on party organization. While internal democracy may be beneficial, possibly indispensable, from the perspective of participatory theories of democracy, this book and others in the OUP series are building a substantial body of intra-party democratic theory that take an opposite view: that the lack of intra-party democracy does not signal a lack of commitment to democratic values, quite the contrary. In the climate of the legitimacy crisis of democracy in general, and political parties in particular, it is crucial that party scholars offer an alternative to the prevailing perspective about and within the parties that the only cure for democracy is more democracy. This book is, in short, essential reading for anyone interested in the complicated relationship between political parties and democracy.