Dissertation Research: Parliaments, Parties, and MPs: A Comparative Study

议会政府完全是关于在立法机构中建立和维持有凝聚力的投票集团。随着时间的推移，政党的发展在很大程度上消除了集团形成的问题(议员们进入议会时已经被分成了党派阵营)。然而，欧盟的维护仍然是一个问题--看看英国保守党在欧盟问题上的解体。这篇论文的主要目的是确定政治制度是否影响一个政党团结行动的能力。特别是，这篇论文考察了选举、议会和政党规则对政党团结的影响。党的团结并不完全依赖于制度；有争议的政治问题和党员之间的意识形态分歧可能会破坏团结，就像团结的准则可以促进团结一样。因此，这个项目的研究设计必须应对两个挑战：(1)必须(1)最大限度地改变制度结构，使制度对政党团结的影响(如果存在)是可见的，(2)提供足够的统计控制，将制度的影响与问题、意识形态冲突和规范的影响分开。现有文献中常见的单一国家研究设计不足以应对这两个挑战。因此，本文采用了一种更有效、更雄心勃勃的研究设计。设计是比较和多层次的，从议员、政党和议会的角度考察了1945-1997年间澳大利亚、加拿大、英国和新西兰的政党凝聚力。跨空间和跨时间的比较增加了制度变量的变异，增加了自由度，加强了统计控制，并提高了外部有效性。在三个分析层面上研究凝聚力使人们能够产生更多可观察到的假设含义，评估结果的可靠性，并揭示个人行为与政党和议会规则之间的联系。

Parliamentary government is all about building and maintaining cohesive voting blocs in the legislature. The development over time of political parties largely has done away with the problem of bloc formation (MPs arrive at parliament already sorted into partisan camps). Bloc maintenance remains problematic, however -- witness the disintegration of the British Conservative Party over the issue of European Union. The principal objective of the dissertation is to determine whether political institutions influence the ability of a party to act cohesively. In particular, the dissertation examines the effect of electoral, parliamentary, and party rules on party unity. Party unity does not depend entirely on institutions; contentious political issues and ideological disagreements between party members can undermine unity just as norms of solidarity can foster it. Thus, the research design of this project must meet two challenges: it must (1) maximize variation in instituional structures so that the effects of institutions on party unity (if they exist) are visible, and (2) provide enough statistical control to separate the impact of institutions from the impact of issues, ideological conflict, and norms. The single-country research design that is common in the existing literature is ill-equipped to meet these two challenges. Accordingly, the dissertation adopts a more effective and ambitious research design that has been employed previously. The design is comparative and multi-leveled, examining party cohesion in Australia, Canada, Great Britain and New Zealand from 1945 to 1997 from the perspective of MPs, political parties, and parliaments. Comparing across space and time increases variation in institutional variables, adds degrees of freedom, strengthens statistical control, and improves external validity. Studying cohesion at three levels of analysis allows one to generate more observable implications of hypotheses, assess the reliability of results, and uncover connections between individual behavior and party and parliamentary rules.