Party Unity in the Swiss Parliament: The Electoral Connection

Traber, Denise; Hug, Simon; Sciarini, Pascal

doi:10.1080/13572334.2013.837259

Cited by 40 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…The rules in the Swiss parliament are only minimally restrictive, reflecting the strong component of 'individual accountability' (Carey, 2009) in the Swiss political system (Traber, Hug and Sciarini, 2014). Compared to other parliamentary systems with a proportional representation electoral system, party leaders in the Swiss parliament have little formal means to control their backbenchers.…”

Section: What Determines Who Speaks?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimating Intra-Party Preferences: Comparing Speeches to Votes

Schwarz¹,

Traber²,

Benoit³

2015

PSRM

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Well-established methods exist for measuring party positions, but reliable means for estimating intra-party preferences remain underdeveloped. While most efforts focus on estimating the ideal points of individual legislators based on inductive scaling of roll call votes, this data suffers from two problems: selection bias due to unrecorded votes, and strong party discipline which tends to make voting a strategic rather than a sincere indication of preferences. By contrast, legislative speeches are relatively unconstrained, since party leaders are less likely to punish MPs for speaking freely as long as they vote with the party line. Yet the differences between roll call estimations and text scalings remain essentially unexplored, despite the growing application of statistical analysis of textual data to measure policy preferences. Our paper addresses this lacuna by exploiting a rich feature of the Swiss legislature: On most bills, legislators both vote and speak many times. Using this data, we compare text-based scaling of ideal points to vote-based scaling from a crucial piece of energy legislation. Our findings confirm that text scalings reveal larger intra-party differences than roll calls. Using regression models we further explain the differences between roll call and text scalings by attributing differences to constituency-level preferences for energy policy.

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Section: What Determines Who Speaks?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimating Intra-Party Preferences: Comparing Speeches to Votes

Schwarz¹,

Traber²,

Benoit³

2015

PSRM

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Neste sentido, o estágio final da aprovação de determinada matéria de interesse no plenário torna-se mais importante quando comparada a votações e procedimentos intermediários (Alemán, 2008 e Traber, Sciarini andHug, 2010).…”

Section: O Uso De Votações Nominaisunclassified

“…Um aspecto relevante, porém ainda pouco explorado é o estudo do comportamento do legislador latino-americano desagregado pelo tema da política. Alguns temas são mais importantes para os partidos políticos do que outros, fazendo com que os mesmos se comprometam com aqueles mais relevantes para seus eleitores (Traber, Sciarini and Hug, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionunclassified

“…A despeito do nível de respaldo dos partidos políticos no Congresso variarem de acordo com a homogeneidade das preferências dos legisladores ou a influência dos líderes partidários (Cox and Morgenstern, 2002), podemos considerar que a soma da disciplina e coesão partidárias resulta na unidade partidária (Carey, 2002). O exame das votações nominais não permite distinguir facilmente a coesão da disciplina partidária (Figueiredo e Limongi, 1998) (Traber, Sciarini and Hug, 2010).…”

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“…O elemento comum a todos esses fatores institucionais é a estruturação dos incentivos que o legislador possui de votar de maneira pessoal ou partidária (Traber, Sciarini and Hug, 2010 (Carey and Shugart, 1995).…”

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