The personal vote and party cohesion: Modeling the effects of electoral rules on intraparty politics
| Author | Royce Carroll,Monika Nalepa |
| Date | 01 January 2020 |
| Published date | 01 January 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0951629819892336 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2020, Vol.32(1) 36–69
ÓThe Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0951629819892336
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The personal vote and party
cohesion: Modeling the
effects of electoral rules on
intraparty politics
Royce Carroll
University of Essex, UK
Monika Nalepa
University of Chicago, IL, USA
Abstract
Conventional wisdom suggests that parties in candidate-centered electoral systems should be
associated with less cohesive policy preferences among legislators. We model the incentives of
party leaders to achieve votingunity accounting for the costs of discipline, showing that candidate-
centered systems have the counterintuitive effect of promoting party agreement on policies and
preference cohesion. These implications for cohesion derive from the degree of control over list
rank held by leaders under open lists (open-list proportional representation, OLPR) and closed
lists (closed-list proportional representation, CLPR). Because discipline is costlier in OLPR, owing
to leaders’ lack of control over list rank, leaders seeking voting unity propose policies that pro-
mote agreement between membersand leadership. Under CLPR, however, leaders can more eas-
ily achieve voting unity by relying on discipline and therefore lack incentives to promote internal
agreement. We then extend the model to allow the party leader to replace members, showing
that preference cohesion itself is greater under OLPR. Further, our baseline results hold when
allowing legislative behavior to affect vote share and when accountingfor candidates’ valence quali-
ties. We interpret our results to suggest that candidate-centered systems result in stronger incen-
tives for developing programmaticparties, compared with party-centered systems.
Keywords
Electoral systems; party cohesion;personal vote; proportional representation
Corresponding author:
Monika Nalepa, 5828 S UniversityAve, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.
Email: mnalepa@uchicago.edu
1. Introduction
A large body of literature in comparative politics has emphasized the effect of elec-
toral systems on the internal politics of political parties. Conventionally, the litera-
ture suggests that candidate-centered electoral systems create incentives to cultivate
a ‘‘personal vote’’ (Carey and Shugart, 1995; Katz, 1985). Under proportional rep-
resentation, the personal vote is most associated with preferential voting in ‘‘open
lists,’’ where individual candidate vote shares determine which candidates win
seats. A ballot structure in which candidates’ votes are pivotal to winning a seat
encourages an emphasis on individual reputations, and this incentive is known to
be important in explaining many aspects of electoral and legislative behavior
(Andre et al., 2014). The most prominent of these arguments is that candidate-
centered electoral systems produce parties that have more difficulty in enforcing
party discipline in legislative voting, compared with party-centered electoral sys-
tems. Consequently, the former would enjoy less party unity than the latter. An
array of work on the topic has explored the association between candidate-
centered party systems and less unified parties (Carey, 2008; Carroll and Nalepa,
2019; Depauw and Martin, 2008; Hix, 2004; Mejı
´a-Acosta et al., 2006; Raunio,
2007), although many studies do not find consistent evidence for this relationship
(Coman, 2015; Desposato, 2006; Dos Santos, 2007; Sieberer, 2006).
The underlying expectation about less unified parties is that candidate-centered
electoral systems not only make enforcing discipline more costly but can also
increase intraparty preference heterogeneity and policy disagreement, leading to
less programmatic parties. As Kitschelt and Smyth (2002) argue, ‘‘party cohesive-
ness is least likely in multimember districts that use preferential votes to choose
individual candidates on party lists;’’ and, further, ‘‘candidate-centered competition
opens the door to clientelist party formation.’’ Scheiner (2006) similarly states that
‘‘where institutions encourage personalistic competition, coherent and complex
programmatic parties are slow to develop because of the differing, personal agen-
das of their members.’’
1
The expected link between personalized electoral systems
and party cohesion has also led to an array of arguments regarding the policy
implications of personal vote electoral systems (e.g., Bowler et al., 1999; Colomer,
2011; Cox and McCubbins, 2001; Crisp et al., 2004; Golden and Chang, 2001;
Hallerberg and Marier, 2004; Lyne, 2008; Picci et al., 2007).
Overall, the extant literature implies both that candidate-centered electoral sys-
tems should lead to less party voting unity and that such contexts should lead to
parties with less coherent policy preferences. Conversely, these arguments would
suggest that party-oriented electoral systems should facilitate ideological agreement
and, by extension, provide an advantage in the development of more programma-
tic parties. As noted, some empirical evidence shows that legislative voting unity is
indeed more difficult to achieve in candidate-centered electoral systems, at least
when incorporating the role of party nomination practices. The difficulty in achiev-
ing behavioral unity in a candidate-centered environment is distinct, however, from
the impact of such rules on preference cohesion—the extent to which parties are
aligned in their policy goals. There is little systematic evidence that party-centered
Carroll and Nalepa 37
rules have directly encouraged more cohesive, more ideological, or more program-
matic parties (Jones, 2005; Mejı
´a-Acosta et al., 2006). In a recent comparative
study, Carroll and Kubo (2019) find no average difference in party-level heteroge-
neity between parties elected under party-centered rules and those with intraparty
competition. In a case study in Sweden, Folke and Rickne (2020) find that the
introduction of candidate-centered rules did not decrease preference cohesion
among members.
Most of the literature tends to focus on cohesion in terms of overall preference
heterogeneity of members, distinguishing this from party discipline (Hazan, 2003).
However, party unity is most directly influenced by the cohesion between the pre-
ferences of members with party leaders and,in particular, members’ agreement with
the policy proposals made by the leadership. Here, we focus on policy agreement
and propose that the very same mechanism expected to hinder legislative voting
unity—the cost of disciplining members—increases leaders’ incentives to ensure
members’ agree with party proposals.
We argue that parties seeking unity have an incentive to promote cohesion to
offset these discipline costs. Counterintuitively, then, electoral systems in which
parties have less control over member’s electoral rank actually encourage greater
policy agreement. We present a formal model to assess the role played by party
control over list rank—the leadership’s ability to determine the priority with which
party members enter the legislature—in channeling incentives for inducing policy
agreement. We depart from the existing literature by focusing on the power of party
leaders to shape the party’s policy position. We show that the discipline costs of
open lists mean that leaders rely more on policy agreement than they would under
closed lists. As their electoral leverage over members declines, party leaders will
seek policies for which achieving unity requires the least discipline. This further
implies that leaders also have a greater incentive to avoid recruiting members who
would reduce policy agreement and therefore require discipline. Thus, we extend
the model to incorporate the replacement of members. We further show that the
core findings are present in extended models. The same result holds when incorpor-
ating the possibility of members being rewarded for their voting behavior and non-
policy aspects of candidate quality.
To the extent that programmatic parties rely on cohesive policy preferences, our
model suggests that preferential voting systems produce incentives in equilibrium
that would offer a greater likelihood for the development of parties with ideological
consistency than party-centered systems, such as fully closed lists. Although elec-
toral systems are only one factor in determining party cohesion, our account pro-
vides an important contribution to understanding the empirical record of electoral
systems and predicting their intraparty effects.
2. A model of list proportional representation effects on policy
agreement
Our model isolates the role played by electoral institutions in channeling incentives
for a party’s policy agreement. We exploit the fact that there are two ways in which
38 Journal of Theoretical Politics 32(1)
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