Institutions and Vote Unity in Parliaments: Evidence from 33 National Chambers

Abstract

The paper looks at the relationship between institutions and vote unity in national parliaments with the help of a large data set of votes from 33 national parliaments. The tests run are the first to confirm empirically the relationship between vote of confidence procedure and vote unity. The paper also provides a theoretical explanation for why the existence of the confidence procedure influences vote unity despite being used only rarely. The vote of confidence influences votes through the development of control mechanisms as well as the selection of party members who are more ideologically united. This study also challenges the view that electoral rules which make candidates individually accountable to voters necessarily lead to more vote defections. The findings suggest that higher personal accountability decreases vote unity only if party leaders do not control candidate nomination. Parties that rely on government finance for campaigns are also more united.

Parliamentary Voting Procedures in Comparison

“…Nevertheless, scholars have relied on roll call data from different contexts without taking these differences into account (see for instance Carey 2007a;Coman 2012;Depauw and Martin 2009;Hix and Noury 2007). Except under rather optimistic assumptions, such comparative work is fraught with considerable problems.…”

“…From the early work by Lowell (1901) and Rice (1925) on various aspects of voting cohesion scholars have developed sophisticated tools to deal with parliamentary voting data (for a survey, see for instance Poole 2005) and gone beyond the British and US parliaments to cover a wide range of legislative chambers (for some comparative work see Carey 2007aCarey , 2009Coman 2012;Depauw and Martin 2009;Hix and Noury 2007). At the same time in terms of both theoretical insights and methodological innovations, work on the US Congress has largely dominated the field.…”

Roll-Call Votes in the German Bundestag: A New Dataset, 1949–2013

“…Third, the data allows a longitudinal analysis of party unity in the Bundestag and can thus contribute to the large body of literature that seeks to explain high levels of voting unity in legislatures as well as determinants of its variation (e.g. Carey 2007;Coman 2015;Kam 2009;Saalfeld 1995b;Sieberer 2006; for a first analysis of our data with regard to party unity see . To conclude, the datasets presented here provide ample opportunity for studying legislative behavior in the Bundestag over time and make the German case accessible for comparative roll call analysis.…”

“…Lewis et al 2017;Poole and Rosenthal 1997) 1 , the European Parliament (Hix et al 2005), and the British House of Commons (e.g. Eggers and Spirling 2016;Norton 1975), on some cross-country comparative datasets for shorter periods of time (Carey 2007;Coman 2015;Hix and Noury 2016;Sieberer 2006), and on numerous contemporary and historical single-country datasets. 2 For the German Bundestag, RCV data has thus far only been available for limited periods of time (Ohmura 2014b;Saalfeld 1995b;Sieberer 2010;Stratmann 2006).…”

“…On the MP level, the most obvious question is why individual MPs express dissent by voting against their parties' majority. Recent research on this question focuses on electoral incentives (e.g Carey 2007;Coman 2015;Sieberer 2006)…”