Intra-Party Democracy and Party Unity: Varied Rules, Varied Consequences

Abstract

ABSTRACT Do parties’ internal dynamics change when they adopt party-wide ballots for important policy and personnel decisions? Parties in parliamentary democracies are increasingly using such procedures, but researchers still disagree about their impact on partisan politics. This article argues that in order to pin down such effects, researchers should more systematically account for how such ballots are conducted. The argument is developed with respect to party unity. Intra-party ballots are described as multi-stage procedures with key rules at each stage whose attributes can exacerbate or mitigate the tensions unleashed by contestation over party decisions. It demonstrates the feasibility of such an approach by proposing measures taken from the Political Party Database (PPDB). It then uses examples from PPDB data to show that these procedures do vary in practice. Having demonstrated how rule differences can be measured using existing or easily gathered data, the paper concludes by calling on future research on intra-party democracy to accept the challenge of studying party ballots in their full procedural diversity.