Caroline Bhattacharya uses an analysis of Bundestag debates on the Euro crisis to highlight the relationship between cohesion and control in internal positioning strategies taking place within political parties.
The Bundestag, the lower house of the German parliament, has traditionally been characterised by high levels of party unity and a cross-party consensus in support of the European Union (EU). These are two of the reasons why Germany has long been considered an unlikely case for politicisation, meaning the increasing contestation of EU politics at the domestic level. However, the euro crisis turned out to be a critical juncture. In particular, the situation in Greece and bailout measures became increasingly controversial, and cracks began to appear in the pro-EU consensus, but these divisions emerged within parties at least as much as between parties. What made the Greek crisis so contentious? How did parties try to contain intra-party contention, and to what extent did they succeed?
Matters related to the EU and European integration differ from other policy areas in that they cut across historically established cleavage lines, most prominently the economic left/right divide and the social libertarian/authoritarian divide, on the basis of which political parties in Europe were founded. Established parties have proven too slow or unable to adapt to the emergence of this new cleavage, and as a result, we have witnessed the rise of challenger parties and growing dissent within mainstream parties. But Germany is a ‘high barrier system’, where challenger parties face a 5% electoral threshold. (Let us remember that the Alternative for Germany started out as a one-issue party promoting Germany’s exit from the Eurozone, and with a 4.7% vote share, the party narrowly missed entry into the Bundestag in 2013, within a year of its founding.) A growing number of members of parliament (MPs) might feel conflicted between party loyalty and personal conviction or constituency interests, but contrary to conscience issues, MPs are rarely given a free vote on matters of EU politics.
Figure 1 illustrates that voting unity in the Bundestag dropped well below average for all parliamentary party groups (PPGs) at some stage between 2010 and 2015. As we would expect, the Social Democrats (SPD) became more united after joining the government coalition in 2013. Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), who have been the major government party since 2005 (together with their Bavarian sister party, the CSU), became more divided over time. This is in line with cleavage theory, which expects conservative parties with a centrist position on European integration to be most susceptible to intra-party dissent on EU issues.
Although voting unity is the most common indicator of party unity, it only tells us part of the story. Party unity should be viewed and approached as a dynamic and multidimensional concept. In fact, party unity is the outcome of the interaction between cohesion and discipline. If a PPG is very cohesive, i.e. homogeneous in terms of preferences, we would expect their members to act in unison (although some MPs could have strategic incentives not to). But if cohesion is lacking, a PPG might still appear unified in their behaviour, if party control and discipline are high.
In a previous study, we show that party control mechanisms and displinary measures affect German MPs in different ways depending on their rank, experience and even gender. Access to the plenary floor of the Bundestag is controlled by PPG leaders, which means that the more importance they attach to a debate, the more they are inclined to amplify the party’s central message by excluding critical voices. Backbenchers, the least experienced MPs and women were underrepresented in plenary debates on the euro crisis, but precisely these categories of MPs made active use of another channel of communication, so-called vote explanations. These are written statements, attached to the parliamentary proceedings and often published on MPs’ personal websites, that any MP can issue to justify her voting decision. Vote explanations provide a low-threshold channel of communication for MPs who do not fully support the party line; and for the same reason, they provide a much better insight into MPs’ preferences, and thus party cohesion, than speeches. Interestingly, we found that vote explanations can also serve as a warning mechanism for PPG leaders, because MPs who deliver a statement are more likely to defect in a future vote on the same issue.
I have hand-coded all 74 plenary speeches, 146 vote explanations by individual MPs and 28 co-authored vote explanations (representing 234 MPs) from the five debates on the Greek crisis between 2010 and 2015. I used the open-source software tool Discourse Network Analyzer for coding and then exported the data to Python for the second step in discourse network analysis (DNA). By combining qualitative content analysis with network analysis, DNA enables us to examine discourse coalitions. So far the method has hardly been used in the parliamentary context, and I demonstrate that it provides a novel approach to analyse and understand party unity and coherence. In order to visualise agreement and disagreement within PPGs, I drew actor congruence networks and conflict networks, which show how many concepts MPs co-support or co-reject (congruence) or disagree on (conflict).
The voting unity scores above suggest that the Greens lack unity, but if we look at the co-occurrence networks in Figure 2 more closely, we find that in terms of their communication they are actually much more cohesive than their voting behaviour might have made us believe. Only in the first debate, Green MPs disagreed on the extent to which the crisis was caused in Greece and whether bank bailouts are justified.
Voting unity among the Christian Democrats has declined over the euro crisis, and this is also reflected in their co-occurrence networks in Figure 3. The third debate (on the extension of the second bailout programme in February 2015) and the fifth debate (on the third package in August 2015) saw most mobilisation and intra-party dissent. However, as shown in Figure 4, this hardly became visible on the plenary floor, as merely one party rebel got the opportunity to speak – and only because the President of the Bundestag allocated extra floor time to him.
This work has illustrated that party unity is best understood as the observable outcome of the interaction between cohesion and control. If we want to gain a better understanding of party unity – and the lack thereof – in parliamentary debates, we need to approach party unity as a dynamic and multidimensional concept and think of new data sources and innovative methodological approaches.
Caroline Bhattacharya is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki. In her doctoral research, she analyses the significance of party control and other intra-parliamentary factors for the contestation of EU affairs in the German Bundestag. She tweets @CarolineBha.