Explaining legislative party discipline in a new democracy: the case of Lithuania

ABSTRACT

We explore what factors explain the legislative party discipline in a new democracy. We choose a Lithuanian case that offers a large pool of roll call votes. We find support for the explanations calibrated for specifics of new democracy. First, overall legislative party discipline tends to increase after the period of decreased electoral volatility. Second, hyper-accountability of voters creates incentives for legislators to defect more often in the last year of parliamentary term. Lastly, our research suggests that office incentives and phases of law-making could be as important explanations of legislative party discipline in new democracies, as in the old.

KEYWORDS:

• Legislative party discipline
• party system institutionalisation
• mixed electoral system
• mega-seats
• Lithuania

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This constituted almost half of the sample – 3,009,106 cases. As a result, a total of 47 votes were eliminated completely.

2 Additionally, some MPs in the Seimas do not belong to any faction and constitute the so-called “Mixed group”. MPs belonging to the “Mixed group” were eliminated from the analysis (in total, 336,292 voting decisions). Also, there were some cases (in total, 36,056 voting decisions) when information about MPs’ mega-seat status was not available (due to some remaining inconsistencies of the data retrieved form the Seimas MP data APIs). These cases were also excluded from the analysis. The final number of votes and voting decisions included into the analysis is provided in Table 1.

3 Usually, there are three stages of legislative act consideration: submission of the draft, consideration (discussion) and adoption. Sometimes the last two stages (or even all the three stages) are merged, if the Seimas decides so (this is mostly the case when a bill is considered “urgent”). These merger considerations stages as they include the adoption stage were also coded as final (1).

4 Usually, MPs supported by the same party in the elections form their own faction in the Seimas. However, many of the factions undergo splits and mergers during the Seimas term. Therefore, all factions formed from MPs supported by the new parties in the elections were considered as factions of new parties.

5 In 2000 election – New Union (Social Liberals), Liberal Union of Lithuania, and Modern Christian-Democratic Union; in 2004 election – Labour Party, Party Order and Justice (Liberal Democratic Party), and Lithuanian Peasant Popular Union; in 2008 election – National Resurrection Party; in 2012 election – Party the Way of Courage and Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania; in 2016 election – Lithuanian Farmers and Greens Union.

6 To run analyses we used glmer() function of the package lme4 (version 1.1-31; see Bates et al. 2015) available in the R software environment for statistical computing and graphics (R Core Team 2022).

7 This model included only the MPs as second-level units and no explanatory variables.

8 Not including independent or control variables except time reflecting variable.

9 Null model in multi-level longitudinal data analysis includes time (occasion) related variable as it gives more realistic estimates of variances in the random part of the model, that are used as baseline to investigate the change of explained variance in more complex models (Hox 2010, 87–89).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mažvydas Jastramskis

Mažvydas Jastramskis is an associate professor at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University. His research interests include political behaviour, presidential politics and political parties. His work has been published in journals such as the Political Research Quarterly, Parliamentary Affairs, Party Politics and Political Studies Review.

Vaidas Morkevičius

Vaidas Morkevičius is a professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Kaunas University of Technology. His main academic interests are public and elite attitudes, political communication and social stratification studies. His most recently co-authored book publication is Is it Possible to Predict the Results of the Seimas Elections? The Problem of Three Bodies in Lithuanian Politics (2018, Vilnius University Press; in Lithuanian).

Lukas Pukelis

Lukas Pukelis is a researcher at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University. His interests include the application of novel computational analysis methods in political science and natural language processing. His work has been published in journals such as the Political Studies Review and East European Politics.