Research topics

Political alliances

We are interested in studying the political parties' choice to ally with each other in order to win an election for an executive office. Within this context, we focus on three particular reasons for the decision of alliance:

• Pragmatism: victory in the elections is the only objective of the alliance, such that potential political enemies (especially parties with very different ideologies) may join just to win. This reason highlights the role of parties and politicians as office seekers;
• Ideology: parties try to compose political groups whose members' ideology is similar. In this case, the winning alliance would implement policies which would please all the alliance's members;
• Loyalty: empirical evidence has reported that political alliances are stable over time, even when they were defeated in the past. The reasons why parties choose to keep those political bonds are one of our interests.

We also study how several other variables affect the alliance decision, such as the number of parties in a given political system, the voting system (e.g. majoritarian and proportional) and the voting method (e.g. two-round system).

Party discipline

In some political systems, congressmen's votes may be influenced or even controlled by their party's leaders. In this context, one can ask what the variables that affect their decision of following the leader's recommendation or voting against their own party's guidance. Therefore, we are interested in studying party discipline and its determinants. Formally, party discipline is the ability of a parliamentary group of a political party to get its members to support the policies of their party leadership. In liberal democracies, it usually refers to the control that party leaders have over their caucus members in the legislature.

We focus on some specific aspects of the phenomenon, namely:

• the determinants of the party discipline, which may include, for example, if the bill to be voted is more or less popular, the congressman's power and independence within the party - which may be reflected on the amount of money the party directes to his campaign-, and the kind of bill - if related to pork barrel, for instance;
• the microeconomics behind politicians' choices of voting. Clearly, when the bill to be voted is controversial, congressmen may face a trade-off between following the party's guidance and voting acordding to his own ideology and then to be punished by his political group. The leader's choice is also of interested, such that the game played by those politicians has an important role in the party discipline;
• how the spatial distribution of the votes received by a congressman affects his discipline. When there are no electoral districts, such that all candidates in a state run against each other, their votes can be concentrated in some regions or be spread along the whole state. Our assumption is that the more concentrated their votes, the greater their power and independence with relation to the party, and then the lower their discipline.