Multiple Principals and Legislative Cohesion

• Author: Joseph Robbins,Frank Thames,Stephen Meserve
• Published date: 01 November 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12165
• Date: 01 November 2017

STEPHEN MESERVE

Texas Tech University

JOSEPH ROBBINS

Shepherd University

FRANK THAMES

Texas Tech University

Multiple Principals and Legislative

Cohesion

In many systems, legislators find themselves accountable to multiple principals.

This article seeks to further answer how legislators decide between their principals and

what factors condition legislators to choose one over the other. We argue that electoral

uncertainty, operationalized as electoral volatility, pushes legislators towards the princi-

pal that has the greatest influence over their re-election. Using European Parliament

electoral results and roll-call data from the second to the sixth European Parliaments

(1984–2009), we show that increases in electoral volatility decreased European group

cohesion and pushed legislators to side more with the positions of their national parties

over their European group when the two disagreed.

To whom are legislators accountable? The obvious answer is

voters. The existing literature on legislative accountability, however,

paints a much more complex picture. Individual legislators must often

consider the demands of not only voters, but also their political parties.

Thus, legislators may need to satisfy the preferences of multiple principals

(Carey 2009). Multiple principals complicate legislators’ conceptions

of responsibility and accountability. Legislators may be responsible to

their constituents, who hold them individually accountable. Voters, in

this situation, become powerful principals. Yet, voters may hold legis-

lators collectively accountable through political parties. In this case,

party leaders, who are responsible for guarding the value of the party

label, become signif‌icant principals as well. While a legislator’s princi-

pals may often agree on policy outcomes, mismatched preferences

between them are not uncommon. These differences force legislators

to make choices about whose interests they will favor.

In reality, conceiving of legislative accountability in terms of voters

and parties ignores the fact that legislators are often responsible to more

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 42, 4, November 2017 515

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12165

V

C2017 Washington University in St. Louis

than simply these two principals. In federal systems, for example, legis-

lators must contend with demands not only from their constituents and

national party leaders, but also party leaders at the regional level and,

perhaps, other regional political elites (Carey 2007). In other systems,

national parties themselves are not unitary, but highly factionalized (e.g.,

Estevez-Abe 2006; Mershon 2001). There, legislators are beholden not

only to their national party leaders but also to their faction leaders. What-

ever the specif‌ics, when disagreement exists between multiple

principals, it creates a nuanced environment within which legislators

must make decisions.

Given the existence of multiple principals, this article seeks to

discover under what conditions legislators opt to side with one principal

over another. We argue that legislators will be more likely to respond to

the demands of the principal most likely to aid their re-election, who we

def‌ine as the “dominant” principal. Moreover, the incentive to side with

this dominant principal is particularly acute during those periods when

there is electoral uncertainty. We suggest that the power balance created

by institutional arrangements cannot solely explain legislator discipline,

and the relative balance of principal inf‌luence may vary over time. We

submit that politicians respond to dynamic changes in their electoral

uncertainty by favoring the positions of the dominant electoral principal

and thus maintaining discipline with it over potential rivals. Electoral

changes heighten the dominant principal’s sensitivity to defections from

its ideal preferences, increasing its monitoring and punishment behavior.

In the wake of major changes in the electorate, dominant principals will

have little tolerance for politician defection to other principals. More-

over, legislators themselves become more concerned with nomination

quality during electoral uncertainty and hew to their dominant principal.

By contrast, when electoral results are stable, dominant principals are

more willing to allow agents to satisfy the demands of other principals.

We test the impact of electoral uncertainty on cohesion in the

context of f‌ive legislative terms (1984–2009) of the European Parliament

(EP). The EP provides an excellent opportunity to test our argument giv-

en that members of the European Parliament (MEPs) must potentially

consider three different principals—voters, national political parties, and

European political groups (hereafter European groups).

1

The existing

research on the EP f‌inds that due to the second-order nature of the EU

elections coupled with electoral institutions that benef‌it parties, there is

little evidence that MEPs are tied directly to voters (Hix and Høyland

2011; Marsh 1988; Reif and Schmitt 1980; Schmitt 2005). In addition,

the extant literature argues that MEPs typically are more concerned with

their reputation with their national party leaderships than their group

516 Stephen Meserve, Joseph Robbins, and Frank Thames

leaderships (Hix 2002; Hix, Noury, and Roland 2007). We use Bayesian

models predicting roll-call vote cohesion to evaluate the impact of

changes in electoral volatility, across EU member countries and over

time, on MEP discipline and national party/European group-loyalty pat-

terns. Our empirical tests show that MEPs alter their behavior in

response to electoral uncertainty, defecting from their groups and obey-

ing their national parties at the expense of groups when volatility

increases.

In terms of EU-specif‌ic implications, recent events increasing

the average electoral volatility of the EP, in particular the accession

of more volatile eastern European countries and the success of far-

right and far-left parties, should lead national parties to tighten their

grip on their MEPs, depriving European groups of their inf‌luence.

Our conclusions are consistent with other researchers seeking the

contextual, often domestic, determinants of MEP discipline (Faas

2003; Farrell and Scully 2007; Hix 2004; Kl€

uver and Spoon 2015;

Lindst€

adt, Slapin, and Vander Wielen 2011, 2012). In addition, our

results further strengthen the argument that MEPs are collectively

accountable to national parties but not necessarily individually

accountable to voters (Hix and Høyland 2013). Moreover, the results

suggest that while the EP is often seen as unimportant due, in part, to

the second-order nature of elections, clearly national parties respond

to electoral uncertainty by pulling their MEPs more closely to their

positions at the expense of EP group cohesion.

Furthermore, in the comparative perspective, the phenomenon of

multiple principals abounds, as virtually every politician confronts dis-

tinct layers of party leadership to a greater or lesser extent. In federal

systems, for example, regional politicians think about the dictates of par-

ty minders at the regional level while simultaneously needing to appeal

to national-level politician preferences. When conf‌lict between princi-

pals arises, politicians must decide which principal to follow. While

much of the answer to this question is prescribed by institutional rules,

with more powerful tiers dictating the actions of actors in lesser tiers, we

suggest that a complete understanding must also consider dynamic fac-

tors inf‌luencing behavior and discipline. Dominant principals may vary

in their commitment to monitoring and punishing agents, sometimes giv-

ing them leeway to follow lesser principals in order to reap policy

benef‌its, depending on the political environment they face. Electoral

uncertainty represents one factor modulating legislator loyalty within

countries, over time.

The article will proceed as follows. First, we review the literature

on cohesion in the EP. Our goal is to explain why national parties are the

517Multiple Principals and Legislative Cohesion