Parliamentary party group leaders take centre stage in contemporary parliaments. To this day, however, their functioning remains rather understudied. Drawing on the parliamentary role literature, and using a series of in-depth interviews with (current and former) PPG leaders, this paper examines the self-reported role orientations of PPG leaders in Belgium. Unlike commonly-assumed theoretical dispositions on ‘position roles’, and despite Belgian PPG leaders’ limited formal authority as intermediaries between the central party elite and backbenchers, we do find role variation among PPG leaders. We more specifically find that PPG leaders, following a ‘logic of appropriateness’ and divergent personal motivations, differ on two dimensions (an external focus vs. an internal focus and a focus on top-down versus bottom-up liaison) leading to four distinct PPG leadership role types. As such, this study has important implications for parliamentary role research (and their conceptions of leadership roles) and should encourage scholars to focus also on frontbench roles
