Party Discipline and Disruptions of Legislative Business: Evidence from India

Legislators represent the views of their constituents and political parties within the legislature. These representations take different forms such as questions, debates or motions, but the manner in which representations are made are expected to adhere to the formal rules of the legislature. However, on occasions, legislators transgress these bounds and display disorderly behaviors, such as by protesting on the floor of the House, shouting slogans and displaying banners, which have been earlier referred to as disruptions or legislative violence (Spary, 2010; Gandrud, 2015; Johnson, 2013). There is a vibrant conversation (Gandrud, 2015; Spary and Garimella, 2013) on the reasons for why legislators choose to disrupt legislative business. My paper contributes to the literature by introducing a novel explanation for legislative disruptions. I argue that along with being manifestations of indiscipline in the legislature, disruptions are also products of discipline exerted by legislative party leaders over legislators. Drawing from insights on party discipline (Cox & McCubbins, 1994; Pearson, 2015), I advance two hypotheses to buttress my claim that disruption is facilitated by party discipline: first, that party leaders incentivize disruptive behavior by rewarding disruptive legislators with priority in the allocation of scarce party resources; and second, that the level of institutionalization of political parties influences their inclination to incentivize disruptions. To test the hypothesis I analyzed original data on disruptions that occurred during the 15th parliamentary term of the Indian parliament. Prior to the statistical analysis I gathered qualitative insights from interviews with Members of the Indian Parliament (MPs) to identify the two resources that are controlled by legislative party leaders in India i.e. Debate opportunities in the legislature and Re-nomination prospects for the next election. Further to this, I used cross-sectional data of more than 500 MPs of the 15th term of the Indian Parliament to statistically test the hypotheses. A summary of the findings are mentioned below. Firstly, I find a significant correlation between the number of debate opportunities that an MP receives and the number of disruptions that he/she participated in. Although it is difficult to infer causation by correlation alone I strengthen my claim by a novel placebo test, which shows that the correlation between disruption and access to legislative instruments applies only to instruments that are controlled by parties and not for instruments that parties do not control (such as questions and private bills). Further to this I also find a correlation between disruption and the subsequent re-nomination probability of the MP. The correlation persists after controlling for plausible confounders such as political strength, financial strength and age. Secondly, I find no difference between institutionalized and non-institutionalized parties with regard to incentivizing disruptive behavior. This result, I infer, stems from the highly institutionalized power imbalance between party leaders and legislators within Indian legislative parties. The study opens up a new area of exploration for researchers working on legislative disruption by bringing light to the unexplored role played by legislative parties.