Party position, elite influence, and its development over the legislative period

Party position is often seen as a rigid location composed of unitary actors, with the time between elections as a black box. I will look at party position as a fluent process made up of the sum of its members. This leads to two research questions: how does the position of individual MPs relate to the overall party position? And how does the party position change over the course of the legislature? I disentangle the mechanisms that connect both questions in order to understand internal party decision-making. Generally speaking, I show who determines the party position at what point during the legislature by applying quantitative methods to analyse speeches in parliament. I use data from the ParlSpeech V2 data set by Christian Rauh and Jan Schwalbach, which contains all speeches in legislative chambers of nine democracies, covering a period between 20 and 30 years. Since the data includes a high range of parties, I can differentiate between internal organisational structures, party families, or different political systems, although the most important comparison will be between the general party line and its members. I expect the party elite to be the main driver in determining party position, especially towards the end of the electoral cycle. As it is possible that there are differences depending on internal organisation, I hypothesise that this effect is stronger when there is a more hierarchical party structure. On the other side, in parties with flatter decision-making processes, the party position should be reflected more by the median position of all members. Furthermore, I expect parties in the first years of the legislature to be more internally divided than in the months before an election. While moderate deviations from the party line in speeches may be tolerated in general, the closer a party is to a general election, the more cohesive they may want to appear. This means that deviators have to act according to the general party line, or are not even allowed to speak at all. Consistent with the literature, this internal cohesion should be especially strong for governmental parties. This research is important because it helps us uncover internal party mechanisms and who influences party positions at what point in time.