Parties are the nucleus of modern parliaments. Therefore it is crucial to understand cooperation and competition within parties. In most modern parliaments, we can observe some form of cooperation, like the cosponsorship of bills or motions. Researching these cooperative devices is promising, since cooperation is always also a relational statement of underlying social structures.
This structure can be inferred upon using network analysis. In this paper, the network of cosponsorship is used to identify the relationship of MPs within their parliamentary party group, and to infer whether this relational position has an effect on their reselection by respective party commissions. Are better embedded and connected MPs more likely to be reselected?
This argument is also of theoretical interest: Scholars lately embraced the notion of multiple principals that structure MP actions (Carey 2007),
but yet have to fully explore the theoretical implications when one of these principals is composed of peers.
The empirical analysis first replicates the model of MP renomination by Baumann et al. (2017). Furthermore, a new data set of cosponsorship (17th German Bundestag) is used to provide a set of additional relational independent variables, most prominently the aformentioned centrallity and embeddness indicators.
The key finding of the empirical analysis is indeed: actor centrality is a significant predictor of MP reselection. Additionally, model fit and effect sizes imply that centrality is a critical indicator, explicitly also in addition to the base model provided.
In conclusion, this analysis shows that cooperation is indeed crucial when it comes to renomination. This has implications for our understanding of peer sourced principals in Multiple Principal Theory.
The paper also furthers our understanding of MP cooperation, and specifically of cosponsorship in the German parliament. Researching parliamentary networks may help to understand not only MP actions, but also delegation, agency and accountability in modern parties.
