Explaining parliamentary party dissent: a comparative analysis.

Within the literature devoted to the study of political parties, scholars have recently directed more attention towards intraparty dynamics. The ‘party as a unitary actor’ assumption seems to have withered away in the last decades. The party is increasingly viewed as a heterogeneous entity, in which dissenting attitudes are frequent. Yet the causes of intraparty dissensions remain quite obscure. My PhD project aims at providing a better understanding of the causes of dissent within parties, especially within parliamentary party groups. Intraparty conflicts, dissent or ‘voice’ phenomena have been studied through different literatures that have developed independently from each other: studies dealing with party factionalism, social-psychological and economic theories of organizations (e.g. Hirschman’s trilogy of exit, voice and loyalty), and legislative studies dealing with parliamentary party voting unity. Theoretically, the project will try to (re)conciliate these separated literatures, and will show how legislative studies, factionalism literature and theories of organizations can help to grasp why parliamentarians are more or less likely to dissent from their party line. At the empirical level, the project aims at analyzing the causes of dissent within parliamentary parties in a comparative perspective. The analysis examines parliamentarians’ attitudes across 15 European national parliaments, by using the PARTIREP MP Survey dataset. The project draws on several theoretical approaches –institutional, rational and sociological– and will test different explanatory models of dissent. These models include variables at several levels (individual, party and system levels). This paper provides an overview of the project’s substance.