Party Discipline and Parliamentary Politics

Kam, Christopher

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511576614

Cited by 391 publications

(466 citation statements)

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“…Carey 2007;Sieberer 2006), or b) has relied on issue-specific explanations for defections from the party line (Schonhardt-Bailey 2003; Berrington and Hague 1998;Cowley and Norton 1999;Lynch and Whitaker 2013;Heppell 2013). Less research offers general theories of individual-level rebellion (but see Kam 2009). We draw theoretical insights from literature focusing on both aggregate and individual levels of analysis.…”

Section: Voting In the Westminster Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ideology, Grandstanding, and Strategic Party Disloyalty in the British Parliament

et al. 2017

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Strong party discipline is a core feature of Westminster parliamentary systems. Parties typically compel Members of Parliament (MPs) to support the party position regardless of MPs' individual preferences. Rebellion, however, does occur. Using an original dataset of MP votes and speeches in the British House of Commons from 1992 to 2015, coupled with new estimations of MPs' ideological positions within their party, we find evidence that MPs use rebellion to strategically differentiate themselves from their party. The strategy that MPs employ is contingent upon an interaction of ideological extremity with party control of government. Extremists are loyal when their party is in the opposition, but these same extremists become more likely to rebel when their party controls government. Additionally, they emphasize their rebellion through speeches. Existing models of rebellion and party discipline do not account for government agenda control and do not explain these patterns.

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Section: Voting In the Westminster Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ideology, Grandstanding, and Strategic Party Disloyalty in the British Parliament

et al. 2017

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“…One caveat is that even if divisions exist, leaders have many institutional, political, and normative sources for influencing party discipline (see Kam 2009;Andeweg and Thomassen 2010). Also, as Hazan (2000) points out, intraparty factionalism does not occur in a vacuum and is connected to public opinion in complicated ways -party factions may be driven by and responsive to cleavages in public opinion and may hinder party leaders' abilities to 'sell' a policy to the public.…”

Section: Intraparty Factionalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

No, prime minister: explaining the House of Commons’ vote on intervention in Syria

Kaarbo

Kenealy

2015

European Security

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On 29 August 2013 the UK House of Commons inflicted the first defeat on a PrimeMinister over a matter of war and peace since 1782. Recalled to debate and vote on UK intervention in Syria, the Commons humbled the government and crucially impacted the development of UK foreign policy. This article places that vote, and the developments leading to it, in the context of the role of parliaments in security policy and explores the relationships between parliamentary influence, leadership, intra-party and intra-coalition politics, and public opinion. From an in-depth analysis of leaders' statements and parliamentary debate, we find a combination of intra-party politics and party leadership were most significant. An additional factor -the role of historical precedent -was also important. Our analysis explores the fluidity and interconnectedness of the various factors for parliamentary influence in foreign policy and offers directions for future theoretical development and empirical research.Keywords: foreign policy analysis; decision-making; UK foreign policy; parliaments. 2'A leader humbled, a nation cut down to size ' (Rachman 2013 This was an unusual case of a parliament defying a PM's preference on a decision to deploy military force. This vote was unprecedented in UK politics and challenges conventional wisdom that Westminster has little influence in security policy. Yet this case also resembles instances of parliamentary influence elsewhere and the factors that explain this vote are consistent with other cases. After a brief description of the backdrop to the vote, we establish the theoretical context of parliaments' role in security policy, setting out the general expectation that parliaments are not particularly influential. At the heart of the article we consider -through a consolidation of previous research -factors that facilitate parliamentary influence in security policy and examine the impact they each had in the Syria vote. In concluding, we use this case to suggest directions for future research. Our aim is to explain this particular vote and to advance research and understanding about the role of parliaments in security policy. We ground our analysis of parliamentary influence in a conceptualisation of political dynamics focusing on group and individual actors from a decision-making perspective. From this wide-ranging research, we consolidate and specify several facilitating factors for parliamentary influence in security policy. They include:• Institutional powers of parliament; 8• Public opinion;• Cabinet type;• Intraparty factions; and• Prime Ministerial (PM) leadership style.These factors can, and often do, act together, but here we present the logic of each separately. Furthermore, none are deterministic; there are caveats to the logic of each of them. Following a comparative, general analysis of factors for parliamentary influence in foreign and security policy, we apply these to the Syria vote.

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“…If cohesion is low, party leaders can induce unity by various institutional carrots (such as promotion within parliament and cabinet; e.g. Kam, 2009;Martin, 2012) and sticks (such as demotion and for cabinet parties the confidence procedure; e.g. Huber, 1996).…”

Section: Explaining Individual Voting Behaviour In Parliament Individmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Second, research on Westminster democracies demonstrates that dissent pays off electorally while progressive career ambitions give MPs incentives to follow the party line. Thus, rational MPs are indeed torn between strategies serving competing principals (Kam, 2009). Third, MP surveys occasionally provide data on how MPs feel about party unity and how they decide when faced with competing demands from their party, their constituents and personal convictions (Andeweg and Thomassen, 2011;Patzelt, 1997).…”

Section: Explaining Individual Voting Behaviour In Parliament Individmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Various studies have explained party unity as the aggregate result of selfinterested behaviour of MPs (e.g. Carey, 2007Carey, , 2009Depauw and Martin, 2009;Kam, 2009;Saalfeld, 1995;Sieberer, 2006Sieberer, , 2010. The most prominent recent rational choice model of party unity -John Carey's Competing Principals Theory (CPT) -uses a principal-agent model to explain dissenting votes based on the behaviour of MPs facing cross-pressure from more than one principal.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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