Party Discipline and Parliamentary Politics

Introduction

The previous chapter showed that dissent can provide MPs with name recognition and votes; in this chapter, I explore the cost of dissent to the party. The party whips and MPs quoted in Chapter 2 suggested that any reward reaped by dissident MPs came at the party's expense. By dissenting, an MP weakens the authority and credibility of party leaders, places colleagues in the difficult position of having to explain away their loyalty to their own constituents, and undermines the party's image as a unified and coherent political force. This characterization of the situation casts party discipline as an archetypal prisoner's dilemma in which MPs, left to their own devices, defect from the party line to secure the benefits of independence and leave their colleagues to bear the burden of supporting unpopular party policies. The result of this myopically self-interested behaviour is to leave the party unable to sustain any collective effort that goes against its members' short-run interests.

This description of intra-party politics provides a tidy functionalist explanation for the institutions that are commonly taken to underpin party discipline (e.g., candidate selection rules, whips, patronage, etc.). Even so, one can point to arguments and evidence that contradict the theoretical assertion that there exists a collective action problem at the heart of intra-party politics.