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In recent years the level of unity in parliamentary parties has continued to increase. Whereas in Congress the party leadership’s capabilities to solve collective action problems and to reduce transaction costs have been in doubt, in parliamentary systems little seems to warrant such doubt. Therefore, the paper’s aim is to trace the party leadership’s particular capabilities to secure party unity in parliamentary systems by means of 1. contract design, 2. screening and selection, 3. monitoring and information requirements, and 4. institutional checks. To the extent that these capabilities affect members differently, it is possible to sketch their contours on the basis of who the rebels are. It is apparent that discipline is not readily explained in terms of rewards and punishments. Factions and tendencies provide perhaps the most valid prediction for dissent in France and the United Kingdom, whereas in Belgium the extra-parliamentary party leadership and a detailed policy agreement have a strong impact on members’ discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A cursory examination of the data concerning modern parliamentary systems suggests that women have acquired over time a greater proportion of representation in said systems. Is this necessarily so? A report from the Inter-Parliamentary Union of the United Nations in early 2001 reported that "Political parties (are) holding back women" from greater participation- "Political parties are the main obstacle to lifting the participation of women in national parliaments from a world average of 13 per cent…"- and the evidence of late suggests not much has changed in the last decade.This work examines the role parties play in women's representation at the state-parliament level. Specifically, I examine the role of the party in the context of party rule changes regarding gender, and whether or not parties that change their rules receive positive reaction from the electorate at the polls. I utilise the Katz and Mair data set (1992) to determine why seven of the eight countries mentioned (I exclude South Africa, ) in the IPU report have greater levels of inclusion. I also examine data from the U.S., the United Kingdom, Belgium, Ireland, and Italy to balance the model, with a total of seventy-seven parties eventually investigated and fifty-nine analysed. I also re-assess the level of membership to-date, using recent IPU and IFES data, to determine if the over-time trend offers any hope for substantive change in women's levels of representation, and to what extent parties have benefited from party-quotas, and what possible reasons there may be for not adhering to quotas. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]