How Legislative Democracy Creates Political Parties Michael Koß, LMU

How legislative democracy creates political parties Michael Koß, LMU Munich forthcoming in: Comparative Politics 51/1, 2018 Introduction Standard accounts on the rise of political parties emphasize the role of the electoral arena. Here, the nationalization of politics arguably led to a homogenization of voting behavior and, eventually, the emergence of coherent political parties.1 From this perspective, the legislative arena appears as “chapter 2” of electoral democracy and is largely determined by party system properties.2 The present article challenges this view and provides empirical evidence for Duverger’s claim that political parties can also emerge in the legislative arena. This argument acknowledges that the legislative arena often constitutes chapter one of democracy at large.3 To capture the different dimensions of democracy, this paper introduces the term “legislative democracy” in which all legislation is subject to consent by assemblies. Legislative democracy often precedes electoral democracy as it may exist without universal suffrage, but not vice versa. Despite the temporal precedence of legislative democracy, scholars have primarily focused on the advent of electoral democracy. Previous research examined the choice of electoral systems, the enfranchisement of voters, and the arrival of the secret ballot.4 In contrast, there exist hardly any analyses of the evolution of parties in legislatures apart from work done on the British House of Commons and the Congress of the United States.5 This article aims to fill this gap by exploring the emergence of political parties in the lower chambers of two emerging European democracies, Sweden and France. The analysis focuses on the period between 1866 and 1958, i.e. the first wave of democratization.6 Legislative democracy creates political parties by means of two institutional mechanisms: control over the plenary agenda in the plenary and powerful committees.7 The centralization of agenda control in the hands of governments vertically differentiates the legislature and serves as an incentive for legislators to exert an ex ante impact on legislation by means of voting discipline maintained by political parties. Alternatively, powerful legislative committees horizontally differentiate the legislature and allow legislators to exert an ex post impact on legislation. This renders seats on powerful committees (and in particular committee chairs) legislative mega-seats, i.e. desirable offices which allow for considerable impact on legislation.8 Given that parties serve as the gatekeepers to seats on powerful committees, their establishment can be regarded as the alternative path of legislative democracy creating political parties. These alternative paths pose the question under which circumstances parties emerged as managers of government agenda control or, alternatively, as gatekeepers of access to powerful committees. In order to uncover the causal mechanism which allowed parties to emerge in legislatures, this paper performs a comparative process-tracing analysis primarily based on transcript evidence that has so far been largely overlooked: the committee reports and parliamentary proceedings underlying procedural reforms. More specifically, the process-tracing analysis focuses on the 37 reforms that were debated on the plenary floor after the beginning of competitive elections in 1866 (Sweden) and 1871 (France), respectively. The Swedish and French legislatures are most similar with respect to potential independent variables explaining the distribution of agenda control and committee power, but most different regarding the ultimate outcome of procedural reform. In both legislatures, a multi-party system evolved and coalition and minority governments were prevalent, both of which were arguably conducive to the emergence of both decentralized agenda control and powerful committees. Committees were indeed empowered in both legislatures; however, in 1958, 2 a procedural path change occurred in the French National Assembly during which agenda control was centralized and committees were disempowered. As the evidence presented here suggests, parties emerge as a response to an increasing quest for procedural efficiency in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and the dawn of competitive elections. Individual legislators preferred the creation of powerful committees which provided them with a return for investing emerging party leaderships with the power to select committee members, namely the prospect of mega-seats on committees. Since party membership became the most important selection criterion for committee membership, the empowerment of committees therefore caused the emergence of parties as gatekeepers of committee access. In contrast, individual legislators were only willing to unilaterally surrender their inherited powers to control the plenary agenda to party leaders if anti-system legislators could credibly threaten to obstruct legislation. Unlike their pro-system counterparts, anti-system legislators have no interest in cooperation with others. Rather, “an anti-system opposition abides a belief system that does not share the values of the political order within which it operates” and aims to either break away from the polity it operates in or to abolish democratic rule as such.9 Obstruction is here defined as the exploitation of procedural loopholes in order to delay or derail legislation.10 Obstructive anti- system legislators are willing to accept full-blown legislative deadlock. In this sense, maintaining legislative democracy by means of a centralization of agenda control not only helps democratic parties to thrive and survive, but also democracy at large. Legislative organization and political parties Scholarship on the advent of political parties mostly focuses on the electoral arena. Here, only coherent political parties were able to fulfil voters’ demand for identifiable and coherent policy 3 platforms. In turn, candidates were increasingly elected on party tickets rather than individual merits which allowed parties to impose discipline upon formerly autonomous legislators.11 In this respect, party organization and party system properties such as fragmentation, patterns of government alternation, or government formation are regarded as crucial for the evolution of legislative organization.12 This article aims to show that this is not the whole story. Parties also emerge in the legislative arena independent of and prior to electoral democracy. Representative institutions were originally neither devised to foster democracy nor the emergence of political parties.13 Historically, individual legislators dominated parliamentary procedure. This is why the “legislative state of nature” is characterized by equal rights of all legislators.14 Two departures from the legislative state of nature allow for the emergence of political parties in the legislative arena: vertical differentiation, i.e. the centralization of agenda control and horizontal differentiation, i.e. the establishment of powerful committees. Agenda control refers to the ability to introduce, amend, and discuss legislation.15 These features correspond to three dimensions of agenda control: timetable, positive, and negative control. Timetable control refers to decisions about which proposals are debated. If governments or majorities control the legislative timetable, they possess gatekeeping power. Positive agenda control encompasses the power to amend legislation or prevent amendments, which is accomplished through restrictive rules (which exclude certain kinds of amendments) or closed rules (which forbid all amendments) as well as the power to make last amendments.16 Negative agenda control comprises measures affecting the length of legislative debates such as closure procedures, which terminate such debates. 4 Agenda control can be defined as centralized if governments or majorities enjoy privileges in two of the three dimensions (timetable, positive, and negative agenda control). The centralization of agenda control is an institutional prerequisite for the dominance of political parties in the legislative arena because serves as an incentive for the cohesion of governing parties and opposition parties alike.17 This cohesion ensures that governments include the policy preferences of their legislators in an ex ante fashion: Since governments cannot rely on compromises with disciplined opposition parties, they have to ensure their proposals reflect the views of rank-and- file legislators to get passed. The second institutional mechanism allowing parties to dominate legislative organization are powerful committees. Committees provide coalition partners without control of executive departments with the expertise necessary to control the actions of the respective minister and to either alter or stop proposals which deviate from their preferences.18 In order to enable legislators to do so, three features of committees are essential: First, committees need to be able to rewrite bill proposals, which not only allows them to change government proposals but also ensures that it is the amended committee version of the proposal which becomes the basis of the plenary debate. Second, permanence, which allows committee members to acquire the expertise which distinguishes them from their ordinary peers not sitting on committees. Third, committees need to be congruent with executive departments which makes it more likely that committees are able to oversee the activities of particular ministers. Committees are powerful

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