In Command but Nowhere to Go? Parliamentary Role Orientations of Party Group Leaders: the Case of Partitocratic Belgium

Parliamentary party group leaders (PPG leaders) are central actors in parliaments across Western Europe. They coordinate intra-party deliberation, manage the party group’s activities, and act as the party’s main spokesperson in crucial debates. Moreover, their duty is to ensure the party’s collective accountability towards the electorate by resolving collective action problems that arise when the rational behaviour of individual members might lead to outcomes undesirable for the group as a whole (Cox & McCubbins, 1993; Strøm & Müller, 2009). PPG leaders thus need to overcome preference heterogeneity among group members, monitor their behaviour and provide incentives that reward cooperative members and punish those who defect (Bailer, 2017). Despite their importance, research on how PPG leaders fulfil their tasks is scarce. How legislators fill in their mandates, and why they do so in a specific manner, has traditionally been the key point of interest of the literature on parliamentary roles (Andeweg, 2014; Blomgren & Rozenberg, 2012). According to prevailing neo-institutionalist approaches, roles are ‘composite patterns of goals, attitudes and behaviours’ (Searing, 1994, p. 36) shaped by a an interplay of institutional constraints (i.e. formal and informal rules) and individual preferences (i.e. rational and/or emotional incentives) (Searing, 1994; Strøm, 1997, 2012). These approaches, however, tend to focus mostly on backbenchers and seem to neglect that legislators occupying a formal leadership position, like PPG leaders, also have some autonomy in defining their role as they posit that these ‘position roles’ are to a great extent determined by institutional rules. We disagree with this rigid conception of leadership roles and argue that PPG leadership positions can be filled in differently by different legislators due to both party-level pressures and individual goals and preferences. In this paper, we present an in-depth study of the role attitudes and behaviours of PPG leaders in Belgium, where PPG leaders, unlike in Westminster democracies, are not the party leaders but act as important intermediaries between the party group and the powerful central party elite. In-depth elite interviews that have been conducted with (current and former) PPG leaders (n=35), with maximal variance based on individual-level (e.g. age, experience, ambition) and party-level factors (e.g. size, government status, ideology) allow us not only to uncover PPG leaders’ role orientations and gain insights in their day-to-day functioning in parliament, but also to detect and explain role variance, for instance regarding to what extent they try to further the wishes of backbenchers to the central party elite (or vice-versa) and to what degree they grant group members autonomy. As such, this paper more broadly aims to further unravel the ‘black box’ of leader-group member interactions and to extend our knowledge on intra-party decision-making in parliament.