Legislative Voting Unity in Central and Eastern Europe 1997-2017

Legislative voting unity is a widely studied subject, especially regarding US and Latin American legislators and Western Europe. However, roll call data collections from Central and Eastern Europe are incomplete and inaccurate (cf. VoteWorld: The International Legislative Roll-Call Voting Website), and their analysis includes, with rare exceptions (eg Carey, Formanek and Karpowicz 1999; Sokolowski et al. al 2008; Dudzinska 2015), only one country and a limited number of terms. As a result, there are no comparative analyses between these countries, and it is virtually impossible to generalize the results of research on Central European parliaments. The paper presents the results of research based on new, cross-referencing database (CEEP, forthcoming 2018) of up-to-date collection of individual voting results in selected Central and Eastern European Parliaments (Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Lithuania, Romania), enriched with parliamentary and legislative metadata and complemented by ParlGov resources, including election results, parliaments and governments. Therefore, it fills the gap in legislative unity theory, completing it with cases of new, post-communist democracies. The paper explores internal and external factors influencing parliamentary party unity, including: country-level differences in electoral systems, candidate selection and the role and strength of parliaments in political system; composition of a parliament and government-opposition relations, party ideology, age, size, and changes in electoral support. Testing hypotheses related to legislative voting unity in cross-national comparison allowed for isolating local and universal effects when controlling macro level variables. Our research shows that while universally observed effects exists (influence of government-opposition division, ideological extremity of the party), there is a great impact of electoral system, as within-party incentives for candidate selection influence the position of individual MPs and their disposition for unanimous voting.