The Audience for Brawls

Abstract

Abstract This chapter addresses the question of the intended audience for the signals being communicated by individual legislators through brawling. The basic argument is that in strong party systems the intended audience for brawling is likely to be partisan—either party leadership or strong supporters in the electorate. In weak party systems, brawling legislators are often attempting to communicate with either elite sources of funding or small segments of the electorate likely to be receptive to more extreme political tactics. Offering empirical evidence for this part of the authors’ theory requires a certain amount of creativity, as most of the potential audiences for brawling are unlikely to readily identify as such. The authors draw on stories and interviews from a number of different countries, as well as previous survey research they have conducted in Taiwan in the context of an actual brawl.