Institutional constraints on members of national parliaments Public Deposited
- Last Modified
- March 20, 2019
- Creator
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Coman, Emanuel Emil
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Political Science
- Abstract
- This dissertation explores the relationship between institutional arrangements and vote unity in national parliaments. It does so with the help of a new dataset of votes from 33 different parliaments as well as interviews with members of Romanian parliament conducted in 2010. The findings affirm the importance of vote of confidence procedure and provides a new theoretical explanation for why it leads to unity despite being used only rarely: it leads to the selection of party members that share similar ideological views; it encourages the creation of mechanisms through which party leaders can control backbenchers. I also find that electoral rules that increase the parliament's members to voters lead to vote disunity only in systems with little party institutionalization. Where parties are strong, their leaders have the capacity to topple the pressures felt by backbenchers.
- Date of publication
- December 2011
- DOI
- Resource type
- Rights statement
- In Copyright
- Note
- "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of Philosophy in the department of political science."
- Advisor
- Marks, Gary
- Language
- Publisher
- Place of publication
- Chapel Hill, NC
- Access
- Open access