Mavericks or Loyalists? Popular Ballot Jumpers and Party Discipline in the Flexible-List PR Context

• Author: Michal Smrek
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129221087961
• Published date: 01 March 2023
• Date: 01 March 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2023, Vol. 76(1) 323–336

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129221087961

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Mavericks or Loyalists? Popular Ballot

Jumpers and Party Discipline in the

Flexible-List PR Context

Michal Smrek

Abstract

Preference voting threatens the power of party leaders in PR contexts to enforce party unity and pursue policy by

encouraging candidates to groom personal reputations. This study posits that party leadership might be able to enforce

party discipline through other means at their disposal even as their control over candidates’election ranks weakens.

These include access to the party label and distribution of senior legislative- and party positions. Using original data from

the Czech f‌lexible-list PR context covering the period between 1996 and 2021, this study shows that the MPs who are

elected thanks to preference voting are no more likely than their colleagues to individualize their legislative behavior or

cast a dissenting roll-call vote. What is more, these popular MPs face a more restricted access to reelect ion and senior

positions that come with agenda-setting power and exposure. This evidence suggests that political parti es take active

steps to limit the autonomy of the MPs who owe their positions to voters.

Keywords

preference voting, personalization of legislative behavior, candidate ballot placement, roll-call loyalty, f‌lexible-list

proportional representation, the Czech Republic

Introduction

Does preference voting in proportional-representation

(PR) contexts produce undisciplined political parties

comprised of unreliable mavericks? In a classical—

closed-list (CL)—PR setup, party organizations determine

the order in which their candidates are elected from the

parties’multicandidate ballots (Carey and Shugart 1995;

Renwick and Pilet 2016). This feature incentivizes can-

didates to take on the role of loyal party soldiers and

produces party groups that are exceptionally cohesive

(Borghetto and Lisi 2018;Yildirim, Kocapınar, and Ecevit

2017). Preference voting is an electoral innovation that

enables voters to alter the composition of their chosen

party’s parliamentary delegation by expressing preference

for one or more candidates listed on the party’s ballot

(Andr´

e et al. 2017;Crisp et al. 2013). The possibility of

getting elected from anywhere on the ballot incentivizes

individual candidates to become more concerned about

their individual reputations among voters and more in-

dependent in their campaign- and/or legislative behavior

(Andeweg and Thomassen 2011;Bouteca et al. 2019;

Carroll and Nalepa 2020;Crisp et al. 2013;Tavits 2009).

While conditions like these might give rise to MPs who

are more attentive to the demands of their constituents,

they also threaten the pursuit of party policy objectives in

fragmented, multiparty PR contexts (Carey 2007). This

study posits that senior party off‌icials in PR contexts

where preference voting is permitted will use their re-

maining gatekeeping roles, like control over candidate

selection or appointments to senior positions, to prevent

the rise of independent mavericks (Carroll and Nalepa

2021;Rich 2014).

The veracity of this claim is tested in the f‌lexible-list

(FL) PR context of the Czech Republic where a non-

negligible number of MPs owe their positions to pref-

erence voting (D¨

aubler, Christensen, and Linek 2018;

Stegmaier, Marcinkiewicz, and Jankowski 2016). A FL

system is a middle ground between the classical CL

system and the so-called ‘open lists’where the order in

which individual candidates are elected is determined by

Department of Government, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

Corresponding Author:

Michal Smrek, Department of Government, Uppsala University, Gamla

Torget 6, SE-753 20 Uppsala 75320, Sweden.

Email: michal.smrek@statsvet.uu.se