The Functioning and Functions of Parliamentary Party Groups (PPGs) in Different Regimes

While party organizations and parliaments are key topics in political science, comparatively little attention has been paid to the parties inside parliament, the Parliamentary Party Groups (PPGs). This is regrettable because party-based groups of representatives help stabilize or even shape politics in many political systems. Since PPGs are internally pluralistic and/or well-differentiated organizations, it is also often rather misleading to treat them as unitary actors (as is usually the case in the comparative literature). Against this background, the panel seeks to shed light on the internal functioning of PPGs as well as their functional relevance in different political systems. We invite papers that deal with those issues in broad terms. For instance, papers may investigate the following topics: leadership within PPGs, ways to achieve voting discipline, the PPGs’ composition and turnover rate, their internal structure, their relationship with the extra-parliamentary party organization or their role(s) within parliament. The panel is open to a variety of methodological approaches (quantitative, qualitative, comparative, historical, theoretical). We aim at bringing together papers focusing on different systems of government (parliamentary, presidential) as well as different regime types (democracy, hybrid and autocratic regimes).