Cracking the whip: the deliberative costs of strict party discipline

ABSTRACT

This article explores the deliberative costs incurred when political parties rely on strict discipline to attain unity. I begin with a brief discussion aimed at clarifying the notion of strict party discipline. The second section explores how such discipline affects the formation, expression and reception of dissenting views. In the third section, I go on to outline two approaches towards deliberation in Parliament: the epistemic approach and the political justification approach. I argue that the impact of strict party discipline on dissenting views entails costs on legislative deliberation conceptualised in either way. The fourth section highlights how intra-party deliberation could potentially mitigate the deliberative costs outlined in this article. Finally, I turn to the implications of my analysis for assessing party discipline, and then I take a closer look at the case of India’s anti-defection law, demonstrating why the deliberative costs outlined in this article are particularly severe there.

KEYWORDS:

• Deliberative democracy
• partisanship
• epistemic democracy
• legislatures

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Andre Bächtiger, Carolyn Hendriks, Bruno Leipold, Tarunabh Khaitan, Alfred Moore, Vatsal Naresh, Simon Niemeyer, David Owen, Ben Saunders, Fabio Wolkenstein and Stuart White for their written comments on previous drafts of this article. I benefitted from discussions with the audiences at the University of Canberra, University of Southampton, Yale Law School, Oxford Political Theory Research Seminars, and the Comparative Political Theory Group in London. I am also grateful to Richard Bellamy and two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Party leaders in systems with confidence conventions are more likely to push for mechanisms that allow them to control backbenchers. On the other hand, backbenchers are also more like to accept these mechanisms in order to avoid collective action problems (Coman, 2015).

2. See Nikolenyi (2011). Nikolenyi suggests that 40 constitutions have anti-defection provisions in their national constitutions but fails to distinguish between the two types I have emphasised.

3. It is worth clarifying that legislators often care about forming the right opinions regardless of the incentives they have in doing so. However, given the epistemically demanding nature of legislation, they are likely to limit their attempt to get things right to a limited number of issues; for instance, issues central to their political project, or those considered salient by their constituency. Since several legislative issues would still fall outside this domain, we should not rely on legislators’ individual motives for forming valid judgments. We ought to pay attention to how institutions are structured in ways that deter or promote this practice.

4. This problem is particularly pressing when party leadership also travels with other demographic features like age, gender and socioeconomic wealth. For more on this, see Allern and Karlsen (2014); Kenig and Rahat (2014).

5. Among other things, this case would have to confront Robert Goodin and Kai Spiekermann’s (2012) argument that second chambers constitute ‘epistemic bottlenecks’ by funnelling decisions taken by a large group through a smaller group of persons. Also see Vermeule (2011) and Schwartzberg (2014, pp. 182–204).

6. Knowledge of backbencher dissent can also lend greater urgency to intra-party deliberation. Robert Jackson (1968, pp. 59–60) offers the example of the impact of backbencher votes against the Second Reading of the Labour Government’s 1947 bill on conscription. This instance led the Parliamentary Party to pass a resolution stating that backbenchers ought to be consulted through special meetings before legislative debates on significant subjects.

7. André Bächtiger and Dominik Hangartner (2010, pp. 623–4) demonstrate how the relaxation of party discipline in Germany resulted in greater respect towards partisan adversaries, and enhanced the productivity of legislative debate on a controversial topic like abortion.

8. Philip Norton (2003, p. 70), for instance, demonstrates that even in the absence of mechanisms of disciplinary control, partisan lines of opposition do not altogether disappear. Instead, fellow partisans tend to show unity, which relies ultimately on ‘emotional or intellectual commitment to a particular party’.

9. I am grateful to Andrei Poama for discussion on this point.

10. Christopher Kam’s (2009, p. 183) research demonstrates how party leaders prefer punishing dissenters in less public ways since applying sanctions publicly make discord even more visible and suggest that they are ‘dictatorial’.

11. As I argued before, deliberative costs could also obtain in the absence of anti-defection laws when party leaders can apply sanctions tacitly. Formally permitting legislators to vote against their party, then, constitutes a necessary but insufficient step towards addressing the deliberative costs outlined in this article.

12. Admittedly, the task is not easy. Consider the following paragraph from a recent article on this subject: ‘Sometimes…it becomes difficult to even identify who occupies which post. The state president of one well-known regional party, for instance, when asked for a list of his party’s office-bearers, was outraged at being asked for information he considered secret… Even when available, lists of “official” office-bearers often do not reflect the true chain of command within the party’ (Chandra & Umaira, 2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Udit Bhatia

Udit Bhatia is a Lecturer in Political Theory at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. He is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford, and his research interests lie at the intersections of democratic theory, political representation and social epistemology. From October 2018, he will be a Junior Research Fellow in Politics at Jesus College, Oxford.