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Candidacy rules and party unity: The impact of multiple candidacies on legislative voting behaviour in Italy

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Abstract

A common approach among scholars is depicting electoral democracy as a two-round competition for offices, starting with elections and continuing with the allocation of legislative offices among legislators. But what happens when the allocation of seats does not end at Round 1 (elections), but continues as a first stage of Round 2? This may occur when candidacy rules allow candidates to be nominated and elected in more than one district. Multiple candidacies create a pool of vacant parliamentary seats, whose allocation depends mostly on party leaders’ choices. Multi-candidacies increase therefore the centralization of candidate selection process, granting leaders greater post-election influence and decreasing the incentives to vote against party line for those MPs whose parliamentary office depends mostly on the leaders’ will. Data on legislators’ voting behaviour in the Italian Chamber of Deputies (2006–2011) support this notion.

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Notes

  1. This is a partial list of the most relevant works in the area: Becher and Sieberer (2008), Carey (2007), Desposato (2006), Ferrara (2004), Herron (2002), Hix (2004), Jun and Hix (2010), Shugart et al (2005), Sieberer (2010), Thames (2005).

  2. Analysing voting behaviour in three Italian legislatures (13th–15th), Curini et al (2011) did not find any empirical evidence of the validity of Tavit’s argument in Italy.

  3. Dual candidacy is frequent both in mixed-member majoritarian systems, like Japan and Italy from 1993 to 2005 (Di Virgilio and Reed, 2011), and in mixed-member proportional ones, such as Germany and New Zealand (Ferrara et al, 2005).

  4. As in Finland during the 1950s, The Netherlands and Italy. The range of electoral systems allowing candidates to be nominated in more than one district includes also the single transferable vote used in Malta.

  5. In The Netherlands, for example, candidates who win a seat in more than one district are declared elected in the district in which they received most preference votes (Andeweg, 2005, p. 498).

  6. Legislature 15th ended prematurely, lasting only 2 years (2006–2008). We limit our analysis to the first 3 years of Legislature 16th (2008–2011), from the beginning to November 2011, when the Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi announced his resignation. The Berlusconi IV government was replaced by a full technocratic cabinet led by Mario Monti, supported by almost all of the parties in the parliament. Given the extraordinary nature of the relationship between the government and the parliament during the year of the Monti cabinet (Pedrazzani and Pinto, 2013), we opt for excluding this period from our analysis.

  7. The Democratic Party was created in 2007 by the merger of DS and The Daisy (DL) – the party to which Giuseppe Fioroni belonged.

  8. The bonus-adjusted proportional system replaced a mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) electoral system that had been adopted in 1993. The MMM electoral system allowed a candidate to be nominated in both the PR and the plurality tier at the same time. Moreover, candidacy rules made it possible for a candidate to be included in up to 3 out of 26 multi-member districts in the PR tier. Conversely, in the pre-1993 PR system – employed in Italy in nine general elections from 1958 to 1992 – candidacy rules made it possible for a candidate to be included in up to 3 out of 31 multi-member districts. During this period, the candidacy rule provisions never worked as a real strategic device. The pre-1993 PR system was an open list one in which voters had multiple preferential votes within the party list: consequently, those votes determined which candidates were elected. To some extent, the open list made the up-to-three candidacy rule ineffective.

  9. Excluding abstentions from the computation of defections produces similar results in our analysis.

  10. Voting records for the Chamber of Deputies are available only starting from 1987 onwards (Borghetto et al, 2012).

  11. Studying the US Congress, Nokken (2009) suggested that final-passage votes are not particularly important for passage, since skilled politicians should be able to structure things before the vote in such a way that bills are approved in any case. In this way, dissidents can vote sincerely without endangering bills’ approval. Given the strong government-opposition dynamics of parliamentary systems, rebellions cannot be neglected, even if they are not determinant for the vote: they harm party reputation and weaken the majority supporting the government.

  12. We duplicate observations also for legislators who jumped from the motley mixed group to another party. For legislators who switched party in the last days of the period under investigation, we consider only the first affiliation.

  13. Party switching is not a big concern during Legislature 15th, but, if not addressed correctly, it could constitute a potential source of problems during Legislature 16th (see Di Virgilio et al, 2012).

  14. Data on multiple candidacies have been recostructed on the basis of the information available in the Italian Historical Archive of Elections (http://elezionistorico.interno.it/, see also Di Virgilio, 2012).

  15. In each legislature, we code as new parties political formations that either contested their first elections in the ballot immediately preceding the start of the term or form during the legislative cycle. Parties resulting from a merger of existing political formations are coded as new ones.

  16. Party leaders, in particular those who have responsibilities in the party organization, are also more likely to miss parliamentary votes.

  17. A β-binomial model constitutes a possible alternative (Tavits, 2009). However, the β distribution ignores 0s and 1s in the outcome variable, while our sample is largely composed by 0s (see Table 3). We employ also a β-binomial model on our data. Results do not substantially change.

  18. Legislators are also clustered in different parties. However, in non-linear models, adding a full set of parties’ dummies to check for party fixed-effect could lead to what is known as the incidental parameter problem (Kalbfleisch and Sprott, 1970). Similarly, using clustered standard errors on parties could make our estimators worse if clusters are few and highly unbalanced, as in our case. Thus, we prefer to model directly the effect of legislative groups on defections including in our analysis variables related directly to party characteristics, such as size, government status and organizational attributes. Notwithstanding, including party dummies or clustering for parties does not modify substantially our results.

  19. Sieberer (2006) found a similar result using party cohesion scores: on average, larger parties show higher unity than smaller ones. This happens despite the bias in the Rice index reported by Desposato (2003, 2005), which tends to inflate small parties’ cohesion scores, making them appear more cohesive than they are. However, this problem is not vital in our study. First, our analysis focuses on the individual share of defections and not on party cohesion scores. Second, the bias is more evident in parties with very few members (<10), while in our study most of the parliamentary groups are composed by at least 20 members.

  20. The draft limits to eight, the maximum number of multiple candidacies.

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Acknowledgements

This article has been originally conceived with Aldo Di Virgilio, who prematurely passed away on February 2015. He was among the first scholars to recognize the importance of multiple candidacies in Italy and significantly contributed to an earlier version of this paper, which was presented at the 4th Annual General Conference of the European Political Science Association (EPSA), Edinburgh, 19–21 June, 2013. This work owes much to the research carried out by Aldo Di Virgilio, who, with his attention for details and for the links binding rules and political competition, has been an invaluable guidance.

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  1. Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna, Strada Maggiore, 45, Bologna, 40125, Italy

    Luca Pinto

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Pinto, L. Candidacy rules and party unity: The impact of multiple candidacies on legislative voting behaviour in Italy. Acta Polit 52, 43–63 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2015.24

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