Mapping ideological diversity from inside parties: A principal-agent approach
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Mapping ideological diversity from inside parties: A principal‑agent approach Florence Ecormier‑Nocca1 Accepted: 23 September 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020
Abstract This article develops a framework to explain ideological diversity within political parties in parliamentary democracies from the positions of individual legislators. First, I review the different theories explaining the variation of ideological diversity within political parties in the field of party politics and legislative studies. Then, I propose to model the relations between legislators, their party and their constituents as a competitive delegation process building on the principal-agent theory. I draw on the literature on the distribution of power within political parties to argue that intraparty ideological diversity can best be explained by vertical bargains taking place between the different territorial layers of political parties. Keywords Intra-party politics · Legislators · Ideological diversity · Principal-agent · Competing principals · Territorial party politics
Introduction Political parties need to be cohesive enough to be able to stabilize their organization, to present a coherent manifesto, to form stable governments and to unite forces to be able to pass policies. At the same time, they must be diverse enough to represent the different voices of their constituency (Esther Herrmann 2017). In this regard, ideological diversity is key to the well being of democracies and the stability of political systems and governments. Yet, in times of increasing polarization, this balance proves difficult to find, which is expressed in difficulties to negotiate coalitions and policy, as well as in numerous party splits. In this context, scholars’ attention has been drawn to centrifugal tendencies within parliamentary parties: explaining why some parties are consistently more or less diverse than others seems more critical than ever. * Florence Ecormier‑Nocca [email protected] 1
Centre d’Études Européennes et de Politique Comparée, Sciences Po, 27 rue Saint‑Guillaume, 75337 Paris Cedex 07, France Vol.:(0123456789)
F. Ecormier‑Nocca
An important amount of works therefore focuses on the existence and organization of diversity within political parties and how the latter come to create, maintain and sometimes impose unity among their ranks. The majority of these studies approach party cohesion through the lens of the voting behaviour of MPs in parliament. As a result, diversity is dichotomous—MPs either vote with their party (unity) or not (dissent)—and is only conceptualized with regards to the national level of political parties, leading to confusions between legislators’ ideological positions and their voting behaviour. Indeed, legislators may have a different position than the official party’s on a certain matter but still toe the line out of solidarity or out of fear of being sanctioned. Moreover, the same voting behaviour may respond to very different motivations: a dissenting vote, for example, may be the expres
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