Path: Janda: Political Parties, Home Page > Part 1: Table of Contents > Chapter 11
Chapter 11: Coherence (pp. 118-125), this is p. 119
(you can navigate to other pages by clicking on page numbers below)
p. 118
----
p. 120
p. 121
p. 122
p. 123
p. 124
p. 125

mated. In the complete absence of empirical data, we estimated party cohesiveness as shown in Table 11.1.

TABLE 11.1 Scheme for Coding Legislative Cohesion
Descriptive Statement
Divisions
Estimated Index
Completely cohesive
| 100 - 0% |
1.00

0.90
Highly cohesive
| 90 - 10% |
0.80

0.70
Somewhat cohesive
| 80 - 20% |
0.60

0.50
Not cohesive
| 70 - 30% |
0.40

0.30
Divisive
| 60 - 40% |
0.20

0.01
Highly divisive
| 50 - 50% |
0.00

Other complications arose in handling this variable. The problem presented by one-party states was met by not scoring parties for legislative cohesion if they monopolized the legislature and if the legislature was not a forum for the expression of intraparty conflict. The presence of bicameral legislatures forced us to choose between chambers in assessing legislative behavior, with the lower house generally selected. Finally, because we had no sound basis for picking issues on which to base our measure of cohesion, we accepted votes reported on any issues.

Coding Results. Coding parties on "legislative cohesion" proved to be every bit as difficult as anticipated. We acknowledge codes for about 60 percent of the cases in Tables 11.2a and 11.2b, but the low means for AC1001 bear witness to uncertainty underlying many of those codes. Fully one-third of our judgments, for example, were tagged with an AC code of 3, indicating the impressionistic character of our scoring. Moreover, the significant correlation of .33 between BV 1001 and AC1001 confesses our tendency to be more confident in determining the presence of cohesiveness than its absence. Despite these faults, the data for BV 1001 merit consideration and comment. Note that the distributions in the tables show the parties clustering at the "cohesive" side of the scale, with proclivities in that direction becoming more pronounced in the later half of the 1950s. Nevertheless, some parties reflect their intraparty squabbles in their legislative voting, as evidenced by low cohesion scores. Therefore the data do seem to be of use for testing propositions about factors affecting party cohesion.

TABLE 11.2a: Mid 1950s: BV10.01 Legislative Cohesion, Recoded

TABLE 11.2b: Early 1960s: BV10.01 Legislative Cohesion, Recoded

Basic Variable 10.02: Ideological Factionalism

The notion of party "factions" has figured prominently in the comparative analysis of political parties, and a party is assumed to lose coherence as its energies are dissipated in factional conflict. Zariski defines a faction as "any intra-party combination, clique, or grouping whose members share a sense of the common identity and common purpose and are organized to act collectively--as a distinct bloc within the party--to achieve their goals" (1960, p. 33). These goals may range across a variety of objectives. For the purposes of our analysis, we are especially interested in factions that arise in the pursuit of party "ideology" (the objective in variable 10.02), more discrete political "issues" (variable 10.03), political "leadership" (variable 10.04), and political "strategy" (variable 10.05).

The distinction between ideology and issues is often difficult to draw, but it hinges on the difference between

go to page 120