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Contestable Leadership: Party Leaders as Principals and Agents

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  • Iaryczower, Matias

Abstract

This paper examines the institutional determinants of discipline in legislative parties. The model formalizes the tradeoff between resources at the leader's discretion, and the leader's need to maintain a minimum level of support to continue leading. The value of the leader's promises of future benefits is here endogenously determined by the backbenchers' beliefs about the extent of support to the leader among other party legislators. Rewards that can be distributed publicly and on the spot are effective tools to coordinate beliefs about the stability of the leader, and thus also increase the value of the leader's promises of future benefits. These spot resources are in fact necessary for the leader to be powerful: without them, the leader can use promises of future benefits to sway members' behavior only if a majority of the party agrees ( ex ante ) with the leader's preferred position in the first place.

Suggested Citation

  • Iaryczower, Matias, 2008. "Contestable Leadership: Party Leaders as Principals and Agents," Quarterly Journal of Political Science, now publishers, vol. 3(3), pages 203-225, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:now:jlqjps:100.00007049
    DOI: 10.1561/100.00007049
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    Citations

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    Cited by:

    1. Curto-Grau, Marta & Zudenkova, Galina, 2018. "Party discipline and government spending: Theory and evidence," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 164(C), pages 139-152.
    2. Zudenkova, Galina, 2011. "A Model of Party Discipline in a Congress," Working Papers 2072/151813, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Department of Economics.
    3. Zudenkova, Galina, 2012. "A rationale for intra-party democracy," MPRA Paper 39091, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Party discipline; Legislatures; Leadership; Vote buying; Global games;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • D78 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Positive Analysis of Policy Formulation and Implementation
    • C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games

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