How Parties Govern: Political Parties and the Internal Organization of Government

Abstract

Party competition is a constitutive component of modern democracies. While indispensable, the division of parliament into competing political parties at the same time creates challenges for these parties. Specifically, the challenges are providing stable government, arriving at government decisions, and making these decisions part and parcel of a coherent and effective government policy. The literature has identified a myriad of mechanisms that government parties devise to master these challenges. For instance, single-party majority governments can use powerful explicit remedies of internal coordination such as electoral manifestos and strong leaders who unite the “number one” positions of the party (party leader) and government (Prime Minister). Single-party minority governments, in turn, may either exploit their pivotal position in the legislature or resort to parliamentary support arrangements. Finally, coalition governments often rely on political institutions as coordination mechanisms or conceive tailor-made means and mechanisms of coalition governance. The literature has identified these mechanisms, outlined how they function, and tried to define the conditions that make the resorting to these mechanisms more likely. Measures of the actual effects of such mechanisms and their optimal configuration constitute the research front.