Party indiscipline as a democratic problem

By Marcos Pérez Talia.

The role played by political parties in contemporary democracies is fundamental. They are key players because they fulfill various tasks that, as a whole, serve to make the political system operative. The issue is that some of their multiple functions may, in some cases, not be adequately fulfilled, which ends up affecting democratic health. In this article I want to emphasize party indiscipline, focusing on what happened with some opposition parliamentarians who recently began their work. I seek to show that indiscipline is synonymous with a low level of partisan institutionalization, which ends up affecting the quality of democracy.

The current parliamentary term began last July 1. The first political action of the new representatives and senators is to elect the boards of directors of both chambers, including the distribution of positions in bodies such as the Jury for the Prosecution of Magistrates, the Magistrates Council or the Bilateral Commissions. the Jury for the Impeachment of Magistrates, the Council of the Magistrature or the Bilateral Commissions. Such spaces are highly desirable since they provide not only greater visibility but also important resources. This usually encourages the emergence of opposition dissidents who deviate from the party line, or spaces that, being opposition, ally themselves with the ruling party.

In the Senate, eight members of the opposition have negotiated with Cartismo to bring Silvio Ovelar as president of Congress. In the House of Representatives, also ten members of the opposition have negotiated with Cartismo to bring Raúl Latorre as president of the Lower House. The explanations of some members of the opposition who agreed with the ruling party were, to say the least, peculiar.

Liberal member Alejo Ríos justified his vote for Cartismo by pointing out that “I was not born to be an opponent, I was always pro-government”, while Liberal senator Édgar López justified his vote for Beto Ovelar because Santiago Peña “wants to do his job well“. On the other hand, in Cruzada Nacional, scandals lurked. As soon as Senator Javier Chaqueñito Vera was sworn in, he went to join the Cartista bench, and in a few hours he was expelled from his party. Even more striking is the case of Senator Zenaida Delgado, who not only allied herself with the pro-government bloc, but also resigned from her party Cruzada Nacional and went to celebrate Horacio Cartes’ birthday at the ANR headquarters.

Parties with undisciplined members make politics more uncertain and negotiation between blocs more costly. In addition, it ends up affecting citizen sentiment towards politics in general, and parties in particular. The political science literature also points out that institutionalization is a key criterion that parties need in order to strengthen democracy, as well as to achieve a high degree of quality in democratic performance.

Parliamentary indiscipline is quite frequent in Paraguayan politics, but these cases are especially noteworthy because they showed, at the beginning of the new period, how united in behavior the main opposition blocs were. The dissociation between the party’s decision and the actions of some of its members soon became evident. The Political Committee of the PLRA had concretely resolved to strengthen the opposition space and avoid the Cartist takeover in Congress; the same for the National Crusade, which even ended up apologizing for its leaks.

One might intuitively think that indiscipline is more likely in recently created parties, such as Cruzada Nacional, where a greater organizational fabric, cohesion and esprit de corps are still lacking. However, the paradox is that in the PLRA there is also a constant presence of undisciplined people, a 136-year-old party, strongly constituted and organized throughout the length and breadth of the country. How can this be understood?

Political parties, whether old or new, have different levels of development and evolution. To fulfill their objectives, they form an organizational structure that contains an internal sphere, which includes party management, policy discussion, and the relationship with congress; and an external one, rooted in society. This double perspective is captured by a classic concept of political science called partisan institutionalization.

According to the work of political scientist Javier Duque, institutionalization is the process by which a party acquires, to a greater or lesser degree, consolidation in its organization and in its links with the population. To evaluate the levels of party institutionalization, the author suggests measuring in two dimensions: an internal one, which he calls systematicity; and an external one, which he calls rooting. As we are interested here in parliamentary indiscipline (which is part of the internal dynamics), we will only look at the first dimension, whose indicators and results are presented in the following table.

Table 1. Levels of institutionalization in the internal dimension of the parties with undisciplined parliamentarians in the current legislative period.

Dimensions	Level of Institutionalization
COMPLEXITY	Strong	Weak	Very weak
Functional and hierarchical organization chart	PLRA	CN
Coordination bodies	PLRA	CN
Conflict between congressmen and party management		PLRA	CN
ROUTINIZATION	Strong	Weak	Very weak
Organization of Congresses and Conventions	PLRA	CN
Convention attendance levels	PLRA	CN
Application of the rules of the game in the election of the party’s leadership.	PLRA CN
Application of the rules of the game in the election of official party candidates.	PLRA – CN
Operation of internal disciplinary procedures		PLRA – CN
COHERENCE	Strong	Weak	Very weak
Voting discipline in the legislature		PLRA – CN
Compliance with program guidelines		PLRA – CN
Compliance with alliance and coalition policies		PLRA – CN

Source: prepared by the authors based on the work of Javier Duque.

The levels indicated are estimates; they can be stronger or weaker depending on the criteria of the evaluator, the historical moment, etc. What we want to emphasize is that parties can have different levels of institutionalization both internally and externally, regardless of the chronological age of the parties. That is, they can have a high level of rootedness with society (such as the PLRA historically, or Cruzada Nacional in 2023) but a low level of organizational coherence, as shown in Table I.

Why is the level of institutionalization relevant? If we think of the external dimension (rootedness with society) it is clearly because if the parties do not manage to penetrate society and have electoral success, they will not survive. However, the internal dimension (systematicity) is much more complex. This is so because, although parties may have successive electoral successes (winning parliamentary seats, governorships, mayoralties, etc.), if they do not manage to complexify their internal structure, routinize their organization and make political action coherent between party authority and parliamentarians, this ends up affecting not only the legitimacy of the party but, in the long term, also democratic health.

Parties with undisciplined members make politics more uncertain and negotiation between blocs more costly. In addition, it ends up affecting citizen sentiment towards politics in general, and parties in particular. The political science literature also points out that institutionalization is a key criterion that parties need in order to strengthen democracy, as well as to achieve a high degree of quality in democratic performance.

With respect to opposition parties, it was stated that they will be stronger if they are coherent, autonomous and deeply rooted in society, that is, if they are strongly institutionalized. Likewise, institutionalized opposition parties have greater capacity and mobilization resources to demand accountability from the government.

In a next article we could propose explanations for the low levels of institutionalization of some of the indicators, as well as tools that could help the parties to improve these indexes.

Cover image: Chamber of Senators, Paraguay