Everything to everyone and the conditioning effect of intraparty cohesion: A replication in a cross-national context

Taking the intraparty politics perspective, Lehrer and Lin recently revisit Somer-Topcu’s work that demonstrates how being ambiguous can help parties expand support in elections. Using survey data from the German Internet Panel, Lehrer and Lin find that intraparty cohesion is a critical moderator of Somer-Topcu’s argument. While Lehrer and Lin’s results are of relevance to a wide literature on party competition, intraparty politics, and political representation, their empirical strategy of relying on only one country prohibits other researchers from drawing meaningful and generalizable conclusions. In this note, we join this literature and reevaluate Lehrer and Lin’s conjecture by using an innovative cross-national survey data that covers 12 European countries. With this comparative data set, we almost perfectly replicate what Somer-Topcu and Lehrer and Lin reveal in their works. Our empirical endeavor not only provides a solid empirical ground to Lehrer and Lin in a cross-national context but also has important implications for future research, particularly on electoral politics, party competition, and democratic representation.

Leadership Competition and Disagreement at Party National Congresses

Theories often explain intraparty competition based on electoral conditions and intraparty rules. This article further opens this black box by considering intraparty statements of preferences. In particular, it predicts that intraparty preference heterogeneity increases after electoral losses, but that candidates deviating from the party’s median receive fewer intraparty votes. Party members grant candidates greater leeway to accommodate competing policy demands when in government. The study tests the hypotheses using a new database of party congress speeches from Germany and France, and uses automated text classification to estimate speakers’ relative preferences. The results demonstrate that speeches at party meetings provide valuable insights into actors’ preferences and intraparty politics. The article finds evidence of a complex relationship between the governing context, the economy and intraparty disagreement.

Ministerial Selection and Intraparty Organization in the Contemporary British Parliament

This article promotes a characterization of intraparty politics that explains how rank- and-file party members control the delegation of power to their cabinet ministers and shadow cabinet ministers. Using the uncovered set as a solution concept and a measure of party members' collective preferences, we explore the hypothesis that backbenchers' preferences constrain the ministerial selection process in a manner that mitigates agency problems. Specifically, promotion is distributed preferentially to members whose own policy preferences are proximate to the uncovered set of all party members' preferences. Our analysis of ministerial appointments in the contemporary British Parliament supports this view. For both the Labour and Conservative parties, front bench appointments are more sensitive to the collective preferences of backbenchers in each party as measured by the party uncovered set than to the preferences of the parties' leaders.