Political parties in parliamentary democracies: Making delegation and accountability work

Abstract

Abstract In modern democracies political parties exist because (1) they reduce transaction costs in the electoral, parliamentary and governmental arenas and (2) help overcome the dilemma of collective action. In Western Europe political parties are the central mechanism to make the constitutional chain of political delegation and accountability work in practice. Party representatives in public office are ultimately the agents of the extra-parliamentary party organization. In order to contain agency loss parties rely on party-internal mechanisms and the institutionalisation of party rights in public rules and, in contrast to US parties, they apply the full range of ex ante and ex post mechanisms. Generally, the role of party is weaker the further down the chain of delegation.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 494 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.