ABSTRACT
Influential accounts of the likely effects of primaries in parliamentary systems draw a rather gloomy picture of the effects of primary election on the ability of parties to act in a cohesive and responsive manner. In parliamentary systems, the cabinet as a rule controls the legislative agenda to a great extent. The responsibility for policy making rests primarily with the government. The chapter examines the degree to which the "electoral connection" affects Icelandic members of parliament (MPs) by comparing the legislative behavior of the MPs who owe their position to the party leadership with MPs and was dependent on the MPs building a personal vote. All the major parties in Iceland have experimented with primaries at one point or another since the early 1970s while none of them has consistently implemented primaries across all the constituencies. Several authors envisage a more complicated relationship, in that the impact of district magnitude may be related to features of the ballot structure.
