Introduction

My purpose is to explore whether democracy within the incumbent party can help citizens to monitor the government, that is, if the internal accountability of party leaders facilitates their external accountability as public office holders. On one hand, voters might reward parties in which internal monitoring provides information needed to control ruling politicians. On the other hand, internal partisan debates may carry too much noise for citizens and entail costs for the political capacity of the government. Voters might, in this case, reward disciplined parties and punish undisciplined ones; this would reinforce the position of leaders at the expense of critical activists. External electoral considerations would then be detrimental to the internal accountability within the party. I examine parliamentary democracies only. The reason is not that parties are different under presidentialism and parliamentarism, but rather that the relationship of the governing party with the executive is not the same.

Let us start with some clarifications on who's who. Think first of voters. Citizens elect for office that party whose promises are closer to their own political preferences, and they want the elected government to be democratically accountable and politically capable. Such a government would provide information about its actions and answer for them at election time. However, it would also need to be able to implement its promises, and this ability could be undermined by internal dissent and factionalism. Voters will face trade-offs if accountability were to hamper capacity, or vice versa.