One Party Line? Intra-Party Bargaining and Policy Formulation in the UK and Germany

Who determines the content of legislation in parliamentary democracies? Policy formulation has generally been considered to bring relationships between executives and legislatives to the forefront. While the question whether parliamentary government is cabinet government or party government has largely been studied on an institutional level, relatively little is known about the bargaining processes within parties. This is partly due to the difficulty of empirically grasping subunits of parties, but also relates to the fact that political scientists have largely treated parties as unitary actors. In most cases, however, parties represent divergent interests of various members in several regional and organizational units. This study aims to fill in this gap by exploring the influence that intra-party groups exert during the formulation of legislative proposals. By combining methods of quantitative text and network analysis a framework is proposed that allows examining and comparing intra-party groups irrespective of their organizational structure or latency. Results for governing parties in the United Kingdom and Germany are presented.