Bonding in Pursuit of Policy Goals: How MPs Choose Political Parties in the Legislative State of Nature

• Author: Michael Herrmann,Ulrich Sieberer
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12231
• Published date: 01 August 2019
• Date: 01 August 2019

455

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 44, 3, August 2019

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12231

ULRICH SIEBERER

University of Bamberg

MICHAEL HERRMAN N

University of Konstanz

Bonding in Pursuit of Policy Goals:

How MPs Choose Political Parties in

the Legislative State of Nature

How do MPs in nascent legislatures choose a political party? We argue

that MPs self-select into groups of like-minded colleagues to achieve favored

policy outputs. MPs identify colleagues with similar preferences based on ob-

served behavior and informative signals such as socioeconomic status, cultural

background, and previous political experience. We test this explanation in the

first democratically elected German parliament, the Frankfurt Assembly of 1848,

that developed a differentiated party system in the absence of electoral and career

incentives. Our statistical analysis shows that MPs were significantly more likely

to join parties that were similar to them with regard to ideology, age, regional

provenance, confession, noble status, and previous parliamentary experience.

Qualitative evidence suggests that major changes in the party system were driven

by disputes over policy. Our findings are particularly important for countries with

more turbulent paths towards parliamentarization than those witnessed by arche-

typical cases like Britain or the United States.

Political parties were born in 19th-century legislatures

(Duverger 1972; Katz and Mair 1995; Krouwel 2006; Scarrow

2006). Today, they play a dominant role in electoral competi-

tion and the internal workings of parliament in virtually all de-

mocracies. A sizeable body of research has relied on re-election,

career, and policy goals to explain why rational MPs give up in-

dividual freedom by joining parties (e.g., Aldrich 1995; Cox and

McCubbins 1993; for a survey, see Saalfeld and Strøm 2014).

By contrast, we know little about the related question of

how MPs in early legislatures decided which party to join. This

question is only addressed in the literature on party switching

(e.g., Desposato 2006; Heller and Mershon 2009; Mershon and

Shvetsova 2013; for a review, see Mershon 2014). However, the

© 2019 Washington University in St. L ouis

456Ulrich Sieberer and Michael Herrmann

strategic situation of party switchers in established democracies

differs markedly from the initial sorting process of MPs during

party formation so that findings from this literature are not nec-

essarily applicable.

This article develops and tests a theory of party choice in

nascent, 19th-century legislatures based on MPs’ policy objec-

tives. Building on Cox’s (2006) concept of a “legislative state

of nature,” we argue that individual legislators join groups of

like-minded colleagues to increase their chances of implement-

ing common substantive goals in parliament and thus sort into

parties based on their policy preferences. MPs infer the policy

positions of fellow legislators from observable parliamentary be-

havior and from characteristics that signal policy preferences,

such as cultura l background, socioeconomic statu s, and previous

political exper ience. Our core hypothesis holds that MPs join the

party whose membership is the most similar to them on these

accounts.

We study party formation in the f irst democratically electe d

pan-German parliament, the “Frankfurt Assembly” (FA) dur-

ing the revolution of 1848/49, in order to test this claim empiri-

cally.1 Within a few months, members of the assembly developed

an elaborate system of parliamentary parties. This rapid devel-

opment is surprising because MPs were elected based on their

standing as loca l dignitaries without establishe d political parties,

and most of them were political newcomers without predictable

political career prospects. Using quantitative and qualitative

methods, we demonstrate that the decisions of MPs to associ-

ate with specific parties can indeed be explained by the desire

to bond with like-minded colleagues in pursuit of policy goals.

Our quantitative analysis of party choice finds strong support

for the relevance of ideological proximity and other informative

cues such as similarity with regard to age, regional provenance,

religious confess ion, noble status, and prev ious parliamentary ex-

perienc e. Further more, qualitative evidence on major party spl its

and mergers identifies policy goals as decisive factor for broader

changes in the par ty system.

The article contributes to the general literature on party

formation in various ways. First, it provides one of the first em-

pirical studies of how MPs in nascent parliaments choose be-

tween alternative parties. Sec ond, by analyzing a case outside the

Anglo-Saxon world, we broaden the scope of research on party

formation in 19th-centur y Europe where many cases do not share

457Bonding in Pursuit of Policy Goals

the rather linea r and uninterrupted proc ess of party development

(Scarrow 2006; Ziblatt 2017, Chap. 2). Third, we show that elec-

toral incentives and career advancement that figure prominently

in previous research on why MPs join parties are not necessary

for initial party formation—policy incentives alone can be suf-

ficient to explain the sorting process.

How Do MPs Decide to Join a Party and

Which Party Do They Choose?

Existing res earch mostly addresses the question of why MPs

create political parties at all. According to this literature, the

emergence of par ties in a hypothetical “legislative st ate of nature”

(Cox 2006) can be explained as a strategy of rational MPs; how-

ever, studies differ with r egard to the goals that MPs are assumed

to pursue. One strand argues that policy-seeking MPs join par-

ties to overcome social choice problems (Aldrich 1995; Schwartz

2018) and common pool dilemmas in the use of plenary time that

threaten to produce legislative gridlock (Cox 2006). In this view,

parties are stable coalitions of MPs formed within parliament

that increase the chances that MPs obtain favored policy deci-

sions. A second type of argument, often used alongside policy

seeking, treats parties as vehicles for individual career ambitions

because they control access to leadership positions within parlia-

ment and the executive branch (Carroll, Cox, and Pachón 2006;

Cox 1987; Cox and McCubbins 2005; Sieberer 2013). A third type

of explanation conceptualizes parties as instrumental for MPs’

(re)election goals. In this view, parties are decision heuristics for

voters that enable MPs to establish long-standing links with the

electorate (Aldrich 1995; Cox and McCubbins 1993). Many impli-

cations of these arguments find empirical support in the process

of party emergenc e and development in (mostly) Anglo-Saxon de-

mocracies (Aldrich 1995; Bowler 2000; Carroll, Cox, and Pachón

2006; Cox 1987; Cox and McCubbins 1993, 2005; Godbout and

Høyland 2015).

We know much less about the question of how MPs in

nascent parliaments sort into parties, that is, which party an

individual MP chooses. The question of party choice has only

been studied with regard to party switching in modern parlia-

ments (Desposato 2006; Desposato and Scheiner 2008; Heller

and Mershon 2009, 2008; Laver and Benoit 2003; Mershon and

Shvetsova 2013; Thames 2007). According to these studies,