Party Discipline And Parliamentary Politics

This text examines the interaction and contention between party leaders and MPs to study the underlying structure of party unity.

Brings together empirical studies of the internal cohesiveness of political party groups in European parliaments and the leadership behavior that leads to disciplined parties in parliament, in sections on theories and definitions, the "Westminster Model," established continental European systems, newly emerging systems, and parliamentary discipline and coalition governments. Chapters originated as papers presented at a spring 1995 workshop held in Bordeaux, France. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Canadians often see politicians as little more than trained seals who vote on command and repeat robotic talking points. Politicians are torn by dilemmas of loyalty to party versus loyalty to voters. Whipped examines the hidden ways that political parties exert control over elected members of legislatures. Drawing on extensive interviews with politicians and staffers across Canada, award-winning author Alex Marland explains why Members of Parliament and provincial legislators toe the party line, and shows how party discipline has expanded into message discipline. This book exposes how democracy works in our age of instant communication and political polarization. Whipped is a must-read for anyone interested in the real world of Canadian politics.

This work examines the relationship between party leaders and Members of Parliament in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, showing how the two sides interact and sometimes clash.

Bridging Canadian party politics and legislative studies, Lost on Division is the most authoritative study available on the development of parliamentary institutions in Canada.

Over the past five years, legislative studies have emerged as a field of inquiry in political science. Many political science associations, both national and international, have created standing sections on legislative studies. There has also been a proliferation of literature on legislatures and legislators. This book focuses on legislatures and how they matter, how they have adapted to changes such as globalization and judicialization, and how they have survived the transition to mass democracies.

This book explores how intra-party politics affects government formation and termination in parliamentary systems, where the norm is the formation of coalition governments. The authors look beyond party cohesion and discipline in parliamentary democracies to take a broader view, assuming a diversity of preferences among party members and then exploring the incentives that give rise to coordinated party behaviour at the electoral, legislative and executive levels. The chapters in this book share a common analytical framework, confronting theoretical models of government formation with empirical data, some drawn from cross-national analyses and others from theoretically structured case studies. A distinctive feature of the book is that it explores the impact of intra-party politics at different levels of government: national, local and EU. This offers the opportunity to investigate existing theories of coalition formation in new political settings. Finally, the book offers a range of innovative methods for investigating intra-party politics which, for example, creates a need to estimate the policy positions of individual politicians inside political parties. This book will be of interest to political scientists, especially scholars involved in research on political parties, parliamentary systems, coalition formation and legislative behaviour, multilevel governance, European and EU politics.

This book explains how parties and their members of parliament structure parliamentary debate, providing novel insights into intra-party politics and representation.