Bonding in Pursuit of Policy Goals: How MPs Choose Political Parties in the Legislative State of Nature

Abstract

How do MPs in nascent legislatures choose a political party? We argue that MPs self‐select into groups of like‐minded colleagues to achieve favored policy outputs. MPs identify colleagues with similar preferences based on observed behavior and informative signals such as socioeconomic status, cultural background, and previous political experience. We test this explanation in the first democratically elected German parliament, the Frankfurt Assembly of 1848, that developed a differentiated party system in the absence of electoral and career incentives. Our statistical analysis shows that MPs were significantly more likely to join parties that were similar to them with regard to ideology, age, regional provenance, confession, noble status, and previous parliamentary experience. Qualitative evidence suggests that major changes in the party system were driven by disputes over policy. Our findings are particularly important for countries with more turbulent paths towards parliamentarization than those witnessed by archetypical cases like Britain or the United States.

Short-lived Parliamentarisation in 19th-century Germany: Parliamentary Government in the Frankfurt Assembly of 1848/1849

“…The quantitative analysis of roll-call voting shows that the logic of parliamentary government was at work in day-to-day business and can thus be considered an established informal institution (Eggers and Spirling, 2018). MPs quickly formed parliamentary party groups that displayed high levels of voting unity (Sieberer and Herrmann, 2019). Cabinet parties voted in unison on the floor and, most importantly, they were significantly more likely than opposition parties to win parliamentary votes even after controlling for party size and other party-specific factors.…”

“…14 This conflict triggered major reorganisation of the party system within the FA after December 1848 (Kramer 1968, pp. 144-149;Sieberer and Herrmann 2019). Furthermore, previous research suggests that the ideological fragmentation that resulted from the two cross-cutting conflict dimensions was a major cause for the exit of many conservative and liberal members during the 'dissolution period ' and The constitution that the FA ultimately passed in 1849 was a compromise between those liberal and democratic forces that favoured the lesser German solution under Prussian dominance.…”

“…160-163;Best and Weege, 1996). Once in office, members of the FA quickly established parliamentary groups that increasingly dominated parliamentary business (Sieberer and Herrmann, 2019;Ziebura, 1963;Kramer, 1968;Best, 1990, ch. 3).…”