Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Partisan Usage of Parliamentary Salaries: Informal Party Practices Compared

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 35; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01402382.2011.648004

1743-9655

Nicole Bolleyer,

Political Influence and Corporate Strategies

Abstract It is widely acknowledged that political parties in European democracies have become increasingly dependent on state resources, most notably direct state funding. Yet cross-national studies on parties' usage of state resources that are not earmarked for partisan purposes, which require the assessment of informal, intra-organisational practices, are still rare. This article looks at one such practice across 33 parties in five European democracies: namely the 'taxing' of national MPs' salaries. Under this practice, candidates who enter elected office on a party ticket are obliged regularly to donate a fixed share of their public salaries to party coffers. The empirical analysis shows that the presence of a taxing rule is more likely in parties with a strong extra-parliamentary organisation, while a leftist ideology facilitates the collection of high salary shares from parliamentarians. Moreover, where party entanglement with the state is particularly pronounced, the partisan usage of parliamentary salaries is easier irrespective of their organisational dispositions. Finally, while in unitary systems national headquarters are usually able to monopolise control over national MPs' contributions, in federal systems regional party executives are able to insist on their share of these payments. Acknowledgements The data collection for this article was conducted in the context of a Marie Curie Early Career Fellowship held at the University of Leiden, July 2009–August 2010. Furthermore, this work was supported by the British Academy (SG-04570) and by the Economic and Social Research Council (RES-239-25-0032). I am grateful for the input of my Leiden colleagues to the project, in particular Ingrid van Biezen, Petr Kopecký and Ruud Koole, as well as for the helpful criticism of the two referees. All remaining mistakes are mine. Notes 1. Not to mention the broader tension with MPs' free mandate that inevitably clashes with parties pressuring their representatives into giving up part of their private income. Accordingly, in Germany and the Netherlands the constitutionality of the practice was questioned as a constraint on the constitutionally guaranteed free mandate of MPs, which in the former setting could be only resolved by a ruling of the constitutional court that confirmed the legality of the practice (which is still contested by some parties, such as the Free Democratic Party, which does not however prevent it collecting taxes from MPs). 2. Through creating a new, external regulator – the Interparliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) – the political elites did not only try to make private abuse of resources attached to parliamentary office more difficult (to calm public outrage after the expenses scandal) but also their partisan usage. The latter issue had gained salient since the 1990s, visible in various debates such as the one around special advisors or in various complaints submitted to the parliamentary Committee of Standards and Privileges, the institution (created in 1995) in charge of examining misconduct of MPs. 3. One of the very few exceptions is the UK Liberal Democrats: in 2009 the party established a 10 per cent minimum tax rate on councillors' allowances to be collected by the local parties but refrained from taking money from national MPs. 4. Examples are Fine Fail or the UK Conservatives. 5. Defined broadly, parties with coalition potential (Sartori 1976 Sartori, Giovanni. 1976. Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]) can be considered as belonging to the ruling cartel. Defined more narrowly, one could refer to the main government parties. 6. Grabow (2001 Grabow, Karsten. 2001. 'The Re-emergence of the Cadre Party? Organizational Patterns of Christina and Social Democrats in Unified Germany'. Party Politics, 7(1): 23–43. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]: 31) proposes the following indicators to distinguish mass (or as he calls it people's) parties from cadre parties empirically: high membership density, strong local branches, balanced distribution of internal decision-making power. Detterbeck (2005 Detterbeck, Klaus. 2005. 'Cartel Parties in Western Europe?'. Party Politics, 11(2): 173–91. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]: 174), in a study of party cartelisation, points to the relative dominance of public office-holders in party organs to capture the power relations between the different faces of parties. 7. Looking beyond the English-language discourse, we find elaborate debates on the Parteienstaat in German literature and on Partitocrazia in Italian. 8. This claim also holds when only comparing parties with a decentralised infrastructure operating in federal systems with those operating in unitary systems. In the former settings, regional party units find it easier to fend off centralising pressures (Bolleyer 2011 Bolleyer, Nicole and Bytzek, Evelyn. 2011. "'Party Taxes in Comparative Perspective'". unpublished manuscript [Google Scholar]). 9. In federal systems such as Germany and Austria, holding regional office tends to serve as a stepping stone for a national career. 10. Note that this characterisation holds less for the Christian Democrats in Scandinavian countries formed as protest movements much later than their counterparts in Germany or Austria. 11. Core comparative sources were Katz and Mair (1992, 1994) covering Austria, Germany, Ireland and the UK. Country-specific literature used to classify parties in the respective countries included: France (Demesmay and Glaab 2009; Haegel 2009 Haegel, Florence. 2009. Partis Politiques et Système Partisan en France, Paris: Sciences Po Presses. [Google Scholar], Knapp 2004 Knapp, Andre. 2004. Parties and the Party System in France, London: Palgrave. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]); Austria (Luther 2005; Müller and Steininger 1994 Müller, C. Wolfgang and Steininger, Barbara. 1994. 'Party Organization and Party Competitiveness: The Case of the Austrian People's Party, 1945–1992'. European Journal of Political Research, 26(1): 1–29. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]); Germany (Detterbeck 2002 Detterbeck, Klaus. 2002. Der Wandel politischer Parteien in Westeuropa. Eine vergleichende Untersuchung von Organisationsstrukturen, politischer Rolle und Wettbewerbsverhalten von Großparteien in Dänemark, Deutschland, Großbritannien und der Schweiz, 1960–1999, Opladen: Leske & Budrich. [Google Scholar]; Grabow 2001 Grabow, Karsten. 2001. 'The Re-emergence of the Cadre Party? Organizational Patterns of Christina and Social Democrats in Unified Germany'. Party Politics, 7(1): 23–43. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Hough et al.2007 Hough, Dan, Michael, Koss and Jonathan, Olsen. 2007. The Left Party in Contemporary German Politics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Kitschelt 1989 Kitschelt, Herbert. 1989. The Logic of Party Formation, Ecological Politics in Belgium and West Germany, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]); Ireland and Northern Ireland (Bolleyer 2010 Bolleyer, Nicole. 2010. 'The Irish Greens – From Protest to Mainstream Party'. Irish Political Studies, 25(4): 603–23. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Mair 1987 Mair, Peter. 1987. The Changing Irish Party System, New York: St. Martin's Press. [Google Scholar]; Mitchell et al.2009 Mitchell, Paul, Evans, Geoffrey and O'Leary, Brendan. 2009. 'Extremist Outbidding in Ethnic Party Systems is not Inevitable: Tribune Parties in Northern Ireland'. Political Studies, 57(2): 397–421. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]); UK (Scarrow 1996 Scarrow, Susan. 1996. Parties and Their Members: Organizing for Victory in Britain and Germany, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Webb 2002 Webb, Paul. 2002. "'Political Parties in Britain – Secular Decline or Adaptive Resilience?'". In Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Societies, Edited by: Webb, Paul, Farrell, David and Holliday, Ian. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 12. The scale ranges from 0 (furthest left) to 20 (furthest right). 13. The British Greens entered the national parliament only recently and are not covered but, based on the secondary literature, they can reasonably be placed to the left of PC and SNP. 14. The data used by Whiteley (2011 Whiteley, F. Paul. 2011. 'Is the Party Over? The Decline of Party Activism and Membership across the Democratic World'. Party Politics, 17(1): 21–44. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) was taken from the ISSP Citizenship Study, 2004. 15. An argument referring to cultural divides rooted in religion are equally problematic: grouping Catholic Ireland and Protestant UK vs. Catholic Austria, Catholic France and mixed Germany make a systematic link unlikely. 16. From 1968 to 1971, Union pour la défense de la République; from 1971 to 1978, Union des Démocrates pour la République. 17. This does not apply to the US, where open primaries undermine any party organisational control in the first place and party taxes are generally absent. 18. The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland and the Social Democratic Labour Party in the UK could not be covered, while for Modem and Mouvement Democrate information on tax shares could not be accessed. 19. Interviews lasted on average half an hour. Most of the interviews were conducted face-to-face and taped. Some follow-up interviews were conducted after the five field trips on the phone to close remaining gaps. 20. A 'specific share' can also be formulated in terms of a minimum requirement. 21. Sometimes MPs' salaries increase with seniority. In these cases the average salary is taken as a reference. 22. Including Sinn Fein, the average is 12.7. 23. Including PCF, the average is 23.2. 24. Also Plaid Cymru and the SNP as regional parties collect these payments on the highest organisational level. 25. Regional parties – such as the SNP – obviously collect national contributions regionally, i.e. do not contradict H4, since contributions are still collected on the highest organisational level. 26. It is called the Bürgerinitiativenfond and is used to finance legal support for citizen initiatives. 27. In 1986, following egalitarian principles, the Greens tried to introduce an upper limit for MPs' salaries (21,000 Austrian Schillings) but most of the MPs refused to pay and the rule could never be implemented (Sickinger 2009 Sickinger, Hubert. 2009. Politikfinanzierung in Oesterreich, Wien: Czernin. [Google Scholar]: 231). 28. The rates are different in each region, regional MPs in Vienna, for instance, pay about 10 per cent, with office-holders on the district level giving away up to 50 per cent of their compensation (the rationale being that if offices are part-time and people have another, main, income, higher contributions are more acceptable). 29. See for corresponding findings Thorlakson (2010), who assesses factors driving regional party autonomy across eight multi-level systems. 30. Another dimension worth exploring – since it shows how different party-subunits relate – is the extent to which the party membership is involved in ensuring compliance of individual office-holders. In most parties information about individual payment patterns is not made public in the wider organisation. It remains a matter between the finance officer (or in severe cases party leader) and the non-compliant MP. In a minority of parties, mostly further on the left, members (who tend to be keen that office-holders contribute their share) might be informed at party congresses to put MPs under pressure.