In the book titled "Legislative Voting and Accountability" (Carey, 2008), John Carey (not to be confused with Kerry), compared the many variables which improve or undermine party unity. Party unity would be described as platform, agenda, but most importantly voting record. Carey's argument included the idea that a party in control of the government is more likely to be unified than a government opposition party. But why is that so?
A recent study of Sweden might provide a sufficient answer. TheLocal.se published an article about recent results of party membership. According to the results, the top parties grew in size, especially the party in power. What is more interesting, however, is the short paragraph at the end of the article that seems to be almost just a "by-the-way" paragraph and not meant to be too significant. In fact, it helps us understand this principle of Carey's. TheLocal.se says that the Centre party actually lost some membership (the Centre party is not in power), and it is likely that this happened because they moved more to the "right" of the political spectrum. Since the party is not in power, it is interesting to see how an entire party shifts its political views, and consequently it is losing favor because of those who were likely very in favor of its previous positions.
So let's think about this. A party in control of the government likely got where it is because the people was in favor of its positions. Therefore, it will want to preserve its ideals and thus be quite unified, almost by necessity. A party outside of the government needs to find the needs of the people which might be a very non-uniform process and as desires and circumstances change, so do the parties which may or may not be okay with party members.
Carey, John. 2008. Legislative voting and accountability. Cambridge University Press.
TheLocal.se, 2012. Rise in polls Lofven-effect: political expert. http://www.thelocal.se/39074 /20120213/ (accessed March 3, 2012).
Interesting. I wonder if this means that parties in power are have less diversity of opinion among them even if they are in a "winner takes all" system like the United States. It would almost see counter-intuitive in that case, because the parties out of power have the incentive to at least appear incredibly unified so that voters would vote for them. The appearance of contention is pretty bad for your party in an election.
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