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Machine generated contents note:1.Party Discipline in Canada --2.Representation --3.Partisan Teams --4.The Communications Arena --5.Message Discipline --6.Government Centralization --7.Parliamentary Caucuses --8.Caucus Research Bureaus --9.Legislative Assemblies --10.Managing Trouble --11.The SNC-Lavalin Affair --12.Advice for a New Parliamentarian.

One of the chief tasks facing political leaders is to build and maintain unity within their parties. This text examines the relationship between party leaders and Members of Parliament in Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, showing how the two sides interact and sometimes clash. Christopher J. Kam demonstrates how incentives for MPs to dissent from their parties have been amplified by a process of partisan dealignment that has created electorates of non-partisan voters who reward shows of political independence. Party leaders therefore rely on a mixture of strategies to offset these electoral pressures, from offering MPs advancement to threatening discipline, and ultimately relying on a long-run process of socialization to temper their MPs' dissension. Kam reveals the underlying structure of party unity in modern Westminster parliamentary politics, and drives home the point that social norms and socialization reinforce rather than displace appeals to MPs' self-interest

Der vorliegende Beitrag befaßt sich mit der parteiinternen Reformdiskussion über Fragen der praktisch-politischen Arbeit sowie des ideologischen Selbstverständnisses der KP Chinas im Spannungsgeflecht einer Stärkung der Parteidisziplin und des Parteigeistes einerseits und administrativ-ökonomischer Notwendigkeiten der Wirtschaftsreform andererseits. (BIOst-Klk)

This article analyses the role of parties in political systems with legislative initiative. The model explicitly takes into account the multi-district nature of elections so that voters recognize that they are not voting for a policy but for members of a policy-making body. In this setting, parties can attain their ideological goals without resorting to extreme discipline of their members in the legislature. With respect to the electorate, although voters are endowed with perfect information about their candidates' ideological stance, this model explains how the legislature will display correlation across ideology & party, a feature often attributed to imperfect information.

This article analyses the role of parties in political systems with legislative initiative. The model explicitly takes into account the multi-district nature of elections so that voters recognize that they are not voting for a policy but for members of a policy-making body. In this setting, parties can attain their ideological goals without resorting to extreme discipline of their members in the legislature. With respect to the electorate, although voters are endowed with perfect information about their candidates' ideological stance, this model explains how the legislature will display correlation across ideology and party, a feature often attributed to imperfect information.