Competing Principles Inside the Party

(I reviewed party unity in a previous blog post.  This post will explain the relationship between party unity and competing principals.)

Political parties increase group accountability when unified.  If a party is unified when voting, it is easy for voters to know how their representative (probably) voted.  Voters can learn how a party voted much more easily than they can learn how their individual representative voted.  Generalized information is distributed more quickly and more widely than specific information.  But if a political party is not unified, the group accountability of the party is diminished.  The voting habits of a particular representative can no longer be assumed to be mostly in line with the party.

John Carey claims that competing principals will decrease party unity.  In practice, this would mean that a member of a parliament might have a constituency that is more liberal than her party, may have been the beneficiary of an older politician's endorsement while running for an open seat, and may have been supported by a special interest group during that same election.  The party, the older politician, the special interest group, and the MP's own district might all want the candidate to vote in different ways.  As the number of competing principals grows, the politician finds herself increasingly motivated to vote in ways that do not align perfectly with her party.

In Japan (an in some other countries), factions exist within the party.  These factions would appear to be divisive; in the DPJ (currently in power), factions may be divided into two groups; factions that support Ozawa Ichiro, and factions that oppose him.  Ozawa Ichiro led the DPJ from 2006-2009.  The DPJ defeated the LDP (which had dominated Japanese politics from 1955-2009) the year Ozawa Ichiro stepped down.  Despite deep-seated differences between factions, the DPJ managed to prepare for and win the 2009 election.  How are Japan's factions, which are clearly principals competing against and within the party, not necessarily detrimental?


Factions in Japan are not ideologically based.  The factions are concerned with material gains; promotion, appointments, control over candidate nomination, etc.  While this does not mean that the factions in Japan do not influence their members' voting habits, factions do allow the parties in Japan to establish a united party vote (most of the time).  There have been several instances where factions have simply left a party (Ozawa Ichiro's faction and another faction left the LDP in 1993), and other instances when factions have voted against the rest of the party.  However, it seems that despite the existence of factions with their own exclusive membership lists, membership fees, offices, and staffs, some competing principals do not decrease party unity.  While party unity is important in achieving group accountability, and competing principals have the capacity to undermine party unity, the existence of competing principals does not make diminished party unity certain.