The behaviour of political parties and MPs in the parliaments of the Weimar Republic

Copyright @ 2012 The Authors. This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below.Analysing the roll-call votes of the MPs of the Weimar Republic we find: (1) that party competition in the Weimar parliaments can be structured along two dimensions: an economic left–right and a pro-/anti-democratic. Remarkably, this is stable throughout the entire lifespan of the Republic and not just in the later years and despite the varying content of votes across the lifespan of the Republic, and (2) that nearly all parties were troubled by intra-party divisions, though, in particular, the national socialists and communists became homogeneous in the final years of the Republic.Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstan

Measuring and Comparing Party Ideology and Heterogeneity

Estimates of party ideological positions in Western Democracies yield useful party-level information, but lack the ability to provide insight into intraparty politics. In this paper, we generate comparable measures of latent individual policy positions from elite survey data which enable analysis of elite-level party ideology and heterogeneity. This approach has advantages over both expert surveys and approaches based on behavioral data, such as roll call voting and is directly relevant to the study of party cohesion. We generate a measure of elite positions for several European countries using a common space scaling approach and demonstrate its validity as a measure of party ideology. We then apply these data to determine the sources of party heterogeneity, focusing on the role of intraparty competition in electoral systems, nomination rules, and party goals. We find that policy-seeking parties and centralized party nomination rules reduce party heterogeneity. While intraparty competition has no effect, the presence of these electoral rules conditions the effect of district magnitude

Incumbency effects and the strength of party preferences: Evidence from multiparty elections in the United Kingdom

Previous researchers have speculated that incumbency effects are larger when voters have weaker partisan preferences, but evidence for this relationship is surprisingly weak. We offer a fresh look at the question by examining the U.K.’s multiparty system. In general, the electoral value of incumbency should depend on the proportion of voters who are nearly indifferent between the parties competing for incumbency; in a multiparty system, that proportion may differ across constituencies depending on which parties are locally competitive. After first showing that U.K. voters in recent decades have stronger preferences between Conservatives and Labour than between Conservatives and Liberals, we show that incumbency effects are larger in close contests between Conservatives and Liberals than in close contests between Conservatives and Labour. By documenting how partisanship influences incumbency effects, our analysis shows that the comparative study of incumbency effects offers broader insights into electoral accountability across political systems

Incumbency effects and the strength of party preferences: Evidence from multiparty elections in the United Kingdom

Previous researchers have speculated that incumbency effects are larger when voters have weaker partisan preferences, but evidence for this relationship is surprisingly weak. We offer a fresh look at the question by examining the U.K.’s multiparty system. In general, the electoral value of incumbency should depend on the proportion of voters who are nearly indifferent between the parties competing for incumbency; in a multiparty system, that proportion may differ across constituencies depending on which parties are locally competitive. After first showing that U.K. voters in recent decades have stronger preferences between Conservatives and Labour than between Conservatives and Liberals, we show that incumbency effects are larger in close contests between Conservatives and Liberals than in close contests between Conservatives and Labour. By documenting how partisanship influences incumbency effects, our analysis shows that the comparative study of incumbency effects offers broader insights into electoral accountability across political systems

The Shadow Cabinet in Westminster systems: Modeling opposition agenda setting in the House of Commons, 1832-1915

This article considers the emergence of an informal institution vital to the functioning of Westminster polities: that the Shadow Cabinet is a 'government in waiting'. It compares the evidence for two theoretical accounts of its timing: a 'procedural' theory wherein the Shadow Cabinet is a solution to internal organizational issues in the House of Commons prior to widespread working-class voting, and a 'competition' theory that predicts that suffrage extension acts as a key stimulus for Shadow Cabinet organization. Gathering a dataset of almost a million utterances in parliament between the First and Fourth Reform Acts, the study provides a novel method of identifying Shadow Cabinet members using the surges in term use from their speeches. It finds that the 'competition' hypothesis is the most plausible version of events, and that the opposition responded to the new 'party-orientated electorate' by strategically reorganizing in a way that mimicked the cabinet's structure

The Shadow Cabinet in Westminster systems: Modeling opposition agenda setting in the House of Commons, 1832-1915

This article considers the emergence of an informal institution vital to the functioning of Westminster polities: that the Shadow Cabinet is a 'government in waiting'. It compares the evidence for two theoretical accounts of its timing: a 'procedural' theory wherein the Shadow Cabinet is a solution to internal organizational issues in the House of Commons prior to widespread working-class voting, and a 'competition' theory that predicts that suffrage extension acts as a key stimulus for Shadow Cabinet organization. Gathering a dataset of almost a million utterances in parliament between the First and Fourth Reform Acts, the study provides a novel method of identifying Shadow Cabinet members using the surges in term use from their speeches. It finds that the 'competition' hypothesis is the most plausible version of events, and that the opposition responded to the new 'party-orientated electorate' by strategically reorganizing in a way that mimicked the cabinet's structure