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Unity in Diversity? The Development of Political Parties in the Parliament of Canada, 1867–2011

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2015

Jean-François Godbout  and
Bjørn Høyland
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Abstract

What explains the development of legislative party voting unity? Evidence from the United States and Britain indicate that partisan sorting, cohort replacement effects, electoral incentives, and agenda control contributed to enhancing party cohesion during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here, these mechanisms are evaluated by analysing a dataset containing all the recorded votes from the Canadian House of Commons, 1867–2011. Overall, we find that partisan sorting and the government’s ability to control the agenda are central to the consolidation of parties over time. Our results underscore the need to integrate institutional rules and legislative agendas into models of parliamentary voting behaviour and suggest that strict party discipline can lead to the development of a multi-party system in the legislative arena.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , July 2017 , pp. 545 - 569
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Department of Political Science, University of Montreal (email: [email protected]); Department of Political Science, University of Oslo (email: [email protected]). An earlier version of this article was entitled ‘Parties and Voting in Parliament’. The authors would like to thank the following research assistants for their help in completing this project: Eve Bourgeois, Monika Smaz and Alison Smith. Support for this research was provided in part by Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant no. 410-2009-2907) and the Norwegian Research Council (grant no. 222442). A supplementary online appendix and replication data and code are available at http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=JPS. Data replication sets are available at http://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/BJPolS. Online appendices are available at http://dx.doi.org/doi: 10.1017/S0007123415000368

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