Lameduck leadership: The effects of interim leadership on party discipline

While party discipline has been studied extensively under standard conditions, there has to date been no work done on the impact of interim leadership on the incentives of legislators and in particular on the frequency of their dissent. Given the prevalence of interim leadership in both federal and provincial governments in Canada, this represents a significant gap in the literature. This paper seeks to explore the impact of interim leadership on incentives by developing a formal model of those incentives, based on existing work on regular leadership. It also discusses two different approaches to modelling sanctions, advancement, policy preferences, and policy outcomes, showing the impact of treating these as continuous choices as compared to treating them as dichotomous options. I find the policy position of the future leader has more importance under the assumption of continuous variables than the assumption of dichotomous variables.