The Dynamics and Consequences of Internal Party Politics

Session Submission Type: Full Submitted Panel

Session Description

Political parties are central actors in representative democracies. By articulating and aggregating interests, presenting voters with coherent electoral alternatives, and formulating and promoting policy, political parties link citizens with their governments. Not surprisingly, the study of political parties has a long tradition in political science. Following the Downsian conceptualization of parties as unified teams, a large strand of the literature has operated under the assumption that parties are unitary actors. Political parties, however, are not monolithic entities; they are complex organizations formed by different actors, including leaders, elected officials, aspirants to office, and rank-and-file activists. Often times, these actors face different incentives, creating tensions between their individual objectives and the collective goals of the party as a whole. Despite remarkable scholarly efforts, the ways in which these tensions affect a party’s ability to achieve its goals and to perform its central functions remain unclear. This panel brings together a set of papers that all contribute to understanding how internal party politics shape different areas of party organization and party behavior.

The first two papers study the factors that shape a party’s ability to discipline its members and, by extension, to maintain the party’s collective reputation. First, Hollyer, Klašnja and Titiunik present a formal model that studies how political parties can influence individual politicians to run programmatic campaigns even when they face individual incentives to operate on the basis of clientelistic exchanges. The main result of the paper identifies a relationship between a party’s ability to enforce discipline and electoral strategy choices of its candidates. Meanwhile, Cox, Fiva, and Smith develop an argument linking the adoption of proportional representation (PR) to party unity through party leaders’ control over nominations. Using historical data from Norway, the paper analyzes both the process of electoral reform that lead to the adoption of PR as well as the effect of this change on the internal cohesion of the major parties at the time.

Next, the papers by Ascencio and Kernell study the origins and consequences of institutional change within political parties. Ascencio presents a game-theoretic analysis of candidate selection democratization, finding that party leaders are more likely to use primaries as their policy preferences converge with those of the party’s rank and file, and as the value of getting the party’s nomination increases. Empirical evidence for this theory is presented from analyses of the use of legislative primaries in Mexico. Finally, Kernell examines the effects of internal party democracy on candidate professionalism. Analysis of two novel datasets on candidates’ backgrounds and candidate selection rules in 66 parties from 20 parliamentary democracies shows how the introduction of more democratic nomination rules has transformed the composition of the parties’ candidate pools.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 11: COMPARATIVE POLITICS

Individual Presentations

• Parties, Legislators, and the Origins of Proportional Representation - Gary W. Cox, Stanford University; Jon H. Fiva, Norwegian Business School; Daniel M. Smith, Harvard University

• Intraparty Politics and Candidate Selection in Mexico - Sergio Jesus Ascencio Bonfil, University of Rochester

• Internal Party Democracy and Candidate Professionalism - Georgia Kernell, UCLA

• Corruption Wins No More than Honesty? Electoral Interveners and Limited Control - Johannes Bubeck, University of Mannheim; Nikolay V. Marinov, University of Mannheim

Chair

• Monika Nalepa University of Chicago

Discussants

• Monika Nalepa University of Chicago

• Daniel Max Kselman IE Business School