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

议会政府就是要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（议员们到达议会时已经被分为党派阵营）。 然而，集团的维持仍然存在问题--英国保守党在欧盟问题上的解体就是明证。 本文的主要目的是确定政治制度是否影响一个政党的凝聚力。 特别是，本文研究了选举，议会和政党规则对政党团结的影响。党的团结并不完全取决于制度;有争议的政治问题和党员之间的意识形态分歧会破坏团结，正如团结的规范可以促进团结一样。因此，本项目的研究设计必须应对两个挑战：它必须（1）最大限度地扩大制度结构的变化，使制度对党的团结的影响（如果存在的话）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无法应对这两个挑战。 因此，本论文采用了一个更有效和雄心勃勃的研究设计，已经采用了以前。 本研究采用多层次的比较研究设计，从国会议员、政党和议会的角度考察了1945 - 1997年澳大利亚、加拿大、英国和新西兰的政党凝聚力。 跨空间和时间的比较增加了制度变量的变化，增加了自由度，加强了统计控制，提高了外部效度。 在三个分析层次上研究凝聚力，可以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.