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Is Personal Vote-Seeking Behavior Effective?: Is Personal Vote-Seeking Behavior Effective?
Abstract
Does representatives' legislative activity have any effect on their electoral performance? A broad theoretical literature suggests so, but real-world evidence is scarce as empirically, personal and party votes are hard to separate. In this article, we examine whether bill initiation actually helps MPs to attract preference votes under flexible list electoral systems. In these systems, voters can accept the party-provided rank order or vote for specific candidates, which allows a clear distinction between personal and party votes. The empirical analysis uses data on bill initiation by Belgian MPs in the period 2003-2007 to explain their personal vote in the 2007 elections. We find that particularly single-authored proposals initiated shortly before the upcoming elections are associated with a larger personal vote.
... A growing body of research indicates that legislative productivity can help parliamentarians increase their personal vote, existing evidence pointing to the importance of sponsoring private member bills (Abel & Navarro, 2019;Box-Steffensmeier et al., 2003;Bowler, 2010;Däubler et al., 2016;Marangoni & Russo, 2018), parliamentary questions and interpellations and reports and speeches (Abel & Navarro, 2019;Marcinkiewicz & Stegmaier, 2019). This research, however, is mostly focused on national or state legislatures, and only very few studies have analysed how legislative productivity influences re-election to the EP. ...
... The list rank position often functions as a cue of candidate quality: earlier studies have shown that candidates nominated higher up on the list do receive more preference votes (Däubler et al., 2016). Since this cue is usually stronger for the first placed candidate (Marcinkiewicz & Stegmaier, 2015), I also control for that position with a dummy variable. ...
... The dependent variable of this study is the percentage of preference votes received by an MEP relative to all preference votes cast for candidates of her party in the district. 4 Similar to previous research (Däubler et al., 2016), this operationalization assumes that voters first select a party and then choose among candidates within the party list to cast their preference vote(s). ...
The absence of an electoral connection is a widely held assumption in the scholarship on the European Parliament (EP) and a cause of serious normative concern about the functioning of the European Union. Weak individual legislator accountability is part of this assumption, even if we still know little about the extent to which legislative performance matters for citizens in EP elections that allow preferential voting. This study is the first to analyse how legislative performance influences the preference vote shares of members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and whether this is moderated by their parties' EU salience and incumbent intra-party competition. It draws on an original dataset that combines candidate and electoral data from three rounds of EP elections held between 2004 and 2014 under open or flexible list rules with information on individual legislative activity (i.e., number of reports, parliamentary questions and speeches) and leadership positions at EP and committee level. One dimension of legislative performance, report writing, is associated with a larger share of preference votes but only for incumbents of parties assigning high salience to the EU. While MEPs win a higher share of preference votes when they face limited co-partisan incumbent competition, this factor does not moderate the electoral connection.
... The short answer of the scholarship is: yes. Voters have been shown to reward bill initiation in the US (Box-Steffensmeier et al., 2003), in the UK (Bowler, 2010), and in Belgium (Däubler et al., 2016); general parliamentary activities in the Czech Republic (Däubler et al., 2018), and in France (François & Navarro, 2019); parliamentary dissent as a valence signal in the UK (Campbell et al., 2019); and constituency oriented parliamentary questions in Romania (Chiru, 2018). Furthermore, in a study explaining the trust in politicians in three countries (US, UK and Denmark), Bøggild (2020) demonstrates that voters prefer that politicians follow constituency interests over party policy. ...
... Although legislators' perceptions on their roles are not always amongst the strongest predictors of the their behaviour (see for instance De Winter, 1997), single-case studies confirm the relationship between representational attitudes and time spent with constituency work, the frequency of contacting citizens, as well as maintaining a constituency office (Andeweg, 2012;Edinger & Vogel, 2005;Gallagher & Holliday, 2003;Katz, 1997;Studlar & McAllister, 1996). It has also been shown that the activities of legislators influence electoral performance (Bowler, 2010;Campbell et al., 2019;Däubler et al., 2016;François & Navarro, 2019). This indicates that voters are aware of MP behaviour to some extent. ...
... This indicates that voters are aware of MP behaviour to some extent. Even if voters do not constantly follow the legislators' work, their activity becomes a factor in the voters' decisions through two mechanisms: credit claiming and increasing name recognition (Cain et al., 1987;Däubler et al., 2016;Grimmer et al., 2012;Steenbergen & Lodge, 2003). Consequently, legislators' role perceptions must be somewhat in alignment with how voters see them. ...
The aim of this study is to understand how electoral rules affect citizens’ satisfaction with democracy. The focus is on the extent to which this effect is mediated by the constituency orientation of legislators and the proportionality of election results. The analysis combines data from the European Social Survey and the Comparative Candidates Survey and covers 24 elections from 14 European countries. The multilevel SEM suggests two results. On the one hand, what majority and some mixed‐member electoral systems gain through increasing constituency orientation, they lose to disproportional election results. On the other hand, open and flexible lists perform better in increasing satisfaction than closed ballots. Importantly, the analysis reveals a winner‐loser gap in how constituency representation and proportionality affect democratic satisfaction. Both are more important for the losers of the elections when they evaluate democratic performance.
... Interestingly, most evidence comes from outside the United States (Chiru 2018;Däubler et al. 2016;Loewen et al., 2014). Moreover, other scholars, measuring the perception of incumbents using survey data, find support the personal vote approach since MPs who deliver constituency service are, generally, better evaluated by respondents (Box--Steffensmeier et al., 2003;Jones 2016;Sulkin et al. 2015). ...
... Precisely although the interest is linked to the broader question of the efficiency of personal vote-seeking behavior, the article explores MPs inclination to (co-)sponsor private motions. Earlier works highlighted an electoral connection of private motions in various polities (Bräuninger et al. 2012;Däubler et al. 2016;Williams 2018;Williams and Indridason 2018), making them an efficient strategy for cultivating a personal vote. The strategic aspect of private motions comes from the use that is made by MPs. ...
... The formal role of this instrument is to influence policymaking and amend the national budget (Pajala 2011). However, MPs have a different goal in mind when sponsoring a private motion (Box-Steffensmeier et al., 2003;Däubler et al. 2016). Despite the low adoption rate, they can signal and claim credit for addressing issues that matter for constituents and, thus, developing name recognition (Däubler et al. 2016, 423). ...
Considerable research argues that voters reward personal vote-seeking behaviors. The expected electoral gain would be the primary driver of MPs' action. Nevertheless, empirical evidence is scarce, and the findings do not always match the theoretical expectations. This article examines the electoral impact of personal vote-seeking behaviors, arguing in favor of integrating party electoral performance into the models. I also propose a new measure of electoral performance based on the evolution of MPs electoral results. Drawing on data from Finland, the findings globally support the theoretical arguments. MPs benefit from personal vote-seeking behaviors, primarily when their party improves its results. The findings have important implications for our knowledge of the personal vote and, more generally, the personalization of politics.
... Parliamentary activities are useful tools for signalling activity and claiming credit and might as such help to improve one's individual reputation, which on its turn allows to cultivate a personal vote (Carey and Shugart, 1995). For instance, MPs can engage extensively in constituency service to increase their local popularity (Chiru, 2018;Lancaster and Patterson, 1990) or behave more independently in parliament, either by voting more regularly against the party (Crisp et al., 2013) or by initiating more individual-based legislative proposals (Bräuninger et al., 2012;Däubler et al., 2016). Undertaking parliamentary activities individually (i.e. by initiating a single-authored legislative bill instead of a co-authored bill) allows MPs to claim all of the credit for himself/herself rather than sharing it with co-partisans or other colleagues. ...
... It helps MPs to improve their name recognition and to distinguish themselves from other MPs. Research among Belgian MPs indeed demonstrated that MPs initiating single-authored bills in the wake of the general elections receive more preference votes on the occasion of these elections (Däubler et al., 2016). ...
... Hence, it still pays off for ambitious MPs to build up a personal reputation leading to a high number of preference votes. Indeed, Däubler et al. (2016) found that the number of single-authored legislative bills in the last year before the elections has an impact on the electoral score of Belgian MPs at these elections. ...
Personalization of parliamentary behaviour is an underexposed aspect of the broader personalization phenomenon. It is the aim of this article to first clarify the concept of personalization in the parliamentary arena, followed by a systematic investigation to what extent and under which circumstances this phenomenon takes place in the Belgian context. We develop four indicators that can be used to measure parliamentary personalization over time and across countries: a rise in the use of individual parliamentary instruments, an increase in single-authored initiatives for activities that could also be conducted collectively, a larger concentration of visible parliamentary activities and an increase in party switching. Our analysis based on an original data set of parliamentary activity in the Belgian House of Representatives (1995–2014) reveals that for none of these indicators a trend of personalization could be noted.
... support at the next elections (Bowler, 2010;Däubler, Bräuninger, & Brunner, 2016). Under ideal circumstances MPs who are active on these legislative and control activities should arguably win more votes in comparison to their colleagues who do not make this effort. ...
... Earlier research, in candidate-centered as well as party-centered systems, found proof for the assumption that 'hard workers' are rewarded with a greater number of personal votes (Bowler, 2010;Crisp et al., 2013;Däubler et al., 2016;Rasch, 2009). But all these studies looked at parliamentary work in a narrow way and solely focused on the number of parliamentary questions or sponsored bills to assess its impact on the number of obtained votes. ...
... This enables them to seduce the meritocratic voter who is interested in MPs that are taking care of issues. It also increases their name recognition and can thus contribute to an MP's personal vote (Däubler et al., 2016). ...
Electoral systems across Europe increasingly invite candidates to build up a personal reputation to earn votes. In this article, we investigate whether parliamentary work can be considered as a personal vote-earning attribute for incumbent MPs based on data of the 2014 elections in Belgium. The results show that when parliamentary work is operationalised in a narrow way (i.e. as the number of bills and the number of oral and written questions of an MP), this has no influence on the amount of preferential votes. When parliamentary work is defined in a broader way (i.e. also including other aspects of the legislative and control function of MPs), parliamentary work has a significant positive effect for MPs from opposition parties. This supports the claim that the number of legislative and control activities is not sufficient to measure the impact of parliamentary work on preferential votes, but that also other aspects of the work should be taken into account.
... First, we question the very plausibility that individual parliamentary activities have any impact on the electoral performance of incumbents. This hypothesis has been tested -with mixed results -for a limited number of legislatures, namely the UK House of Commons (Bowler 2010), the European Parliament (Navarro 2010) and the Belgian Chamber of Representatives (Däubler et al. 2016). Here, we want to test it again in one parliament where the electoral impact of parliamentary work is a priori uncertain, namely the French National Assembly. ...
... With the partial exceptions of Däubler et al. (2016) for the Belgian MPs and Navarro (2010) for the members of the European Parliament, there has been no systematic attempt to compare the effects of different types of parliamentary activity. One challenge for this article will therefore be to assess the effects of various activities pertaining to the varied functions of parliaments. ...
... Contrary to earlier studies which took bill initiation as the most significant indicator of parliamentary activity (Bowler 2010;Däubler et al. 2016), we decided to select a plurality of variables reflecting the constitutional functions parliaments and the tasks MPs must take charge of . The list of activities a legislator may perform is potentially unlimited (legislators may deliver speeches, meet with lobbyists, send letters to their constituents, table legislative amendments, etc.) and it is not clear what the voters really want their representative to do. ...
This paper studies the impact of incumbent MPs’ activities on their electoral fortune. We address this question in the context of the French political system characterized by an executive domination; a candidate-centered electoral system; and an electoral schedule maximizing the impact of the presidential elections. Given the contradictory influence of these three institutional features on the relationship between MP’s activities and electoral results, their overall impact can only be assessed empirically. We test the effects of several measurements of the MPs’ activities on both vote share and reelection probability at 2007 legislative election, and we take into account the potential bias related to the decision to be candidate. We show that MPs’ activities differently impact both the incumbents’ candidacy prospects, their first-round vote share and their reelection. Despite the weakness of the French National Assembly, several parliamentary activities, especially bill-initiation, have a positive effect on the MPs’ electoral prospect.
... Building on the idea of a personal vote (Cain, Fiorina, and Ferejohn 1990), a growing body of research shows that hard-working MPs receive extra votes in subsequent elections and are consequently more likely to be re-elected (Bouteca et al. 2019;Papp and Russo 2018). This literature specifically investigates the type of activities and mechanisms that make a difference (Sulkin, Testa, and Usry 2015), such as general retrospective judgements on the incumbents' competence (Kulisheck and Mondak 1996), constituency-oriented activities (Chiru 2018), the initiation of legislation (Bowler 2010;Däubler, Bräuninger, and Brunner 2016), or particular styles of representation (Martin 2010). It also seeks to unveil the conditional effects of distinct institutional features (in particular the electoral rules) on the relationship between incumbents' parliamentary records and re-election prospects (Papp 2018). ...
... With regard to legislative functions, earlier studies treat the introduction of bills as a key strategy for MPs to demonstrate their productivity and thus increase their re-election chances (Bowler 2010;Däubler et al. 2016). In the French context, two categories of "propositions de loi" can be distinguished, depending on how many MPs supported them: there is a distinct indicator for "single-author bills" and another one for "co-signed bills". ...
This article examines factors that influence voters’ knowledge of their representatives, a key element in securing the responsiveness and accountability of parliamentarians. We argue that the parliamentary work of MPs (Members of Parliament) benefits incumbents through increased name recall, and that this relationship is conditional on: the incumbents’ candidacy; the voters’ political competence; and their ideological proximity with their representatives. Combining data on French MPs’ activities with a 2007 CSES post-election survey enables us to test our hypotheses, while controlling for confounding factors. The empirical analysis demonstrates that some parliamentary activities increase the voters’ capacity to recall the name of their MPs. The latter are therefore incentivised to be responsive to and serve their constituents. However, we also find that voters’ political competence and ideological proximity with their MP alter the relationship between parliamentary work and name recall. This may potentially introduce some biases in the democratic process of accountability.
... Because it tends to limit itself to one activity indicator, bill initiation generally speaking (Bowler, 2010), it is unable to establish what strategy, if any, is electorally successful. With the partial exceptions of Däubler et al. (2016) and Bouteca et al. (2019) for Belgian deputies and Navarro (2010) for members of the European Parliament, there has been no systematic attempt to compare the effects of different types of parliamentary activities. ...
... The three last indicators of in-parliament activity are strictly related to the legislative process. Earlier studies treated the introduction of bills as a strategy for MPs to increase their reelection chances (Bowler, 2010;Däubler et al., 2016). In the French context, two categories of bills (propositions de loi) must be distinguished depending on how many MPs supported them: there is a distinct indicator for 'single-author bills' and another one for 'co-signed bills'. ...
This paper studies the relationship between incumbent MPs’ activities and their electoral fortune. We address this question in the context of the French political system characterized by an executive domination, a candidate-centered electoral system, and an electoral schedule maximizing the impact of the presidential elections. Given the contradictory influence of these three institutional features on the relationship between MPs’ activities and electoral results, the overall link can only be assessed empirically. We test the effects of several measurements of MPs’ activities on both their vote share and reelection probability in the 2007 legislative election. We show that MPs’ activities are differently correlated to both the incumbents’ vote shares in the first round and their reelection. Despite the weakness of the French National Assembly, several parliamentary activities, especially bill initiation, have a significant effect on MPs’ electoral prospects.
... Press conferences, interviews aimed at revealing their policy initiatives to the public, and even conflict situations, in which representatives engage with other officials, put them in the spotlight, and ensure broad coverage of their activities (Herrnson 2004;Stonecash 2008). In turn, MPs' visibility can play an instrumental role in elections by either adding a personal dimension to organizational attachment in the case of partisan voters or by winning over undecided citizens (Däubler, Bräuninger, and Brunner 2016). Incumbent legislators have countless opportunities to convey messages about the quality of their activity. ...
... They can play the cards of experience, expertise or political authority. Thus, even without remembering specific initiatives, voters are exposed to the idea of the hard-working legislator and tend to reward them (Cotta and Best 2007;Däubler, Bräuninger, and Brunner 2016). ...
Conventional research on political careers has emphasized the use of local offices as a springboard for national careers. However, movements in the reverse direction can also happen when local offices are available and attractive for national level politicians. This article argues that various types of legislative behavior and party strategy influence the likelihood that national legislators run in local elections and tests how this happens. The analysis focuses on Romania and uses an original dataset compiled for the 2016 local elections. Our findings show that legislators with a rich record of parliamentary activity will continue at the national level, while those who do constituency work, and those who can help their parties more locally, move to local politics.
... Building on the idea of a personal vote (Cain, Fiorina, et Ferejohn 1990), a growing body of research shows that hard-working MPs receive an additional share of votes at new elections and are consequently more likely to be re-elected (Papp et Russo 2018 for a recent overview). This literature investigates what gets rewarded (Sulkin, Testa, et Usry 2015), distinguishing between general retrospective judgements on the incumbents' competence (Kulisheck et Mondak 1996) and integrity (Chang, Golden, et Hill 2010), and more specific aspects of parliamentary work, such as constituency oriented activities (Chiru 2018), the initiation of legislation (Bowler 2010;Däubler, Bräuninger, et Brunner 2016) or the style of representation (Martin 2010). It is also interested in establishing the conditional effects of distinct institutional features (in particular the electoral rules) on the relationship between incumbents' parliamentary record and re-election prospects (Papp 2018). ...
... We first assess the incumbent MPs' activity in relation to the legislative process. Earlier studies treat the introduction of bills as a strategy for MPs to increase their reelection chances (Bowler 2010;Däubler et al. 2016). In the French context, two categories of "propositions de loi" can be distinguished depending on how many MPs supported them: there is a distinct indicator for "single-author bills" and another one for "co-signed bills". ...
In contemporary democracies, elections do not only allow the voters to select their future representatives; they also allow them to hold the incumbents accountable retrospectively. In return, re-election seeking parliamentarians have an incentive to adopt behaviours that are deemed to please their constituents. The functioning of this electoral accountability mechanism depends on several conditions. The first is the voters' willingness to take individual characteristics into consideration (rather than party affiliation) when deciding who to support. The second is that the voters know who their representatives are and have an idea of what they are doing. In this article, the link between citizens and parliamentarians is tested by looking at whether parliamentary activities have an impact on voters' knowledge of their representatives. We make the hypothesis that parliamentarians who are the most active in the assembly should gain visibility and that the voters should reward them in the subsequent election. This hypothesis finds preliminary empirical support in another study (Navarro & Francois 2017), where we tested the impact of parliamentary activities on the candidacy and election scores of incumbent MPs. This time, we will base our analysis on the outcome of a post-electoral survey with the voters of randomly-selected electoral districts. The focus of the article will be on the 2007 French legislative elections.
... More specifically, even if the parliamentary questions on local problems do not trigger governmental action and actual solutions, MPs can still claim credit for putting these issues on the agenda (for a similar argument regarding the electoral payoff of bill initiation see: Däubler et al., 2016). Asking constituency questions can be also framed as acting upon salient issues that other politicians have neglected. ...
... In addition to the hypothesized effects, I control for the effect of seven variables: overall parliamentary effort (an index of parliamentary activities salient for each legislature), electoral security at the previous elections, parliamentary experience, parliamentary office, cabinet position, gender and party affiliation. Plenty of studies failed to uncover any positive impact of parliamentary activity levels on electoral success or re-election (Akirav, 2015;Däubler et al., 2016), while others did (Bowler, 2010). Nevertheless, it is extremely important to control for this variable in order to be confident that the analyses actually measure the electoral 4 Fidesz needed two times fewer votes per parliamentary mandate than Unity and three times fewer than Jobbik and LMP, the other two parties managing to win representation (Mudde, 2014). ...
Drawing on a unique data set that combines legislative behaviour data and electoral results at two elections in Romania (2008, 2012) and one in Hungary (2014), the study assesses the overall electoral value of parliamentary questions dealing with local issues. Our multivariate regression analyses illustrate that the effect of constituency questions is distinguishable from that of the overall parliamentary effort of the MPs. Constituency questions brought Romanian MPs significantly more votes at each of the last two elections. In Hungary, where the scope for a personal vote was much more limited at the analysed elections, no effect is found.
... Similarly, Yildirim (2020) shows that junior MPs respond much more strongly to the presence of legislative cameras in parliament compared to senior MPs and adjust their parliamentary behaviour accordingly. Various other studies considered the role of seniority in shaping vote-and reputation-seeking incentives, although using it only as a control variable in their models (Däubler et al., 2016;Sieberer & Müller, 2017;Zittel et al., 2019). Based on this discussion, I argue that junior MPs are likely to find greater value in engaging in emotional displays during their speech time. ...
The use of emotive rhetoric in legislative debates has attracted increasing scholarly attention in political science research. Building on recent scholarship, I examine the conditions under which emotive rhetoric dominates legislative speeches in the UK House of Commons between 2001 and 2015. By coding nearly half a million legislative speeches according to Ekman's six basic emotions-anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise-I argue that members of parliament (MPs) strategically use emotions in their speeches to maximize their influence and visibility. The findings reveal modest but discernible effects related to electoral safety, seniority, and party status. Specifically , the results show that speeches by electorally vulnerable, junior, and opposition MPs contain higher levels of emotive language compared to those by other MPs. Notably , despite considerable similarity in the correlates of individual emotion categories, there are also significant differences. For example, opposition MPs and electorally vulnerable MPs rely more heavily on negative emotions such as anger, disgust, fear, and sadness than government MPs and electorally safer MPs. While junior MPs use fear, sadness, and surprise at higher rates compared to their senior counterparts, they are statistically indistinguishable from senior MPs in their use of anger, disgust, and joy. Overall, these results underscore the need for greater scholarly attention to the communication styles of representatives in legislatures and emphasize the importance of examining the nuanced strategies behind the use of different types of emotions.
... Still, this tool is used by coalition and opposition members. Coalition members submit PMBs about conflictual issues on which the government does not wish to take direct responsibility, when the government wants to avoid the political embarrassment of defeat, or when individual members wish to submit a bill against the government's policy (Däubler et al. 2016). Opposition members use PMBs to promote their policy agenda, especially on issues the coalition is divided on (Seeberg 2013). ...
Members of parliament routinely submit private bills. Yet, a minority of these bills are enacted. Existing research suggests that, because of the low enaction rates of private members' bills, policymaking motivation is not the primary purpose of members of parliament in submitting these bills. We question this assumption and argue that existing research examines the policy effect of Private Member Bills (PMB) too narrowly. Taking a policy process perspective, we propose, first, that a more accurate assessment of the success rate of private members' bills should look only at the bills entering the legislative process. Second, we propose that the policy effect of private members' bills should not be limited to the end result of enactment, but rather to examine their effect on the agenda-setting stage. We demonstrate these propositions using the case of private members' bills in Israel, a country that has one of the highest rates of PMBs and has institutionalized the process of evaluating them. The study provides a better understanding of private members' bills in parliamentary democracies.
... In general, legislators can rely on a whole range of tools to signal expertise through their legislative activities, such as bill initiation, parliamentary questions, speeches, or amendments. Whereas bills or speeches constitute visible signals to the electorate (e.g., Däubler et al., 2016), amendments are fairly technical matters that are often introduced at the committee stage and are therefore mostly invisible to the electorate. Moreover, no other instrument permits legislators to show their ability to draft legislation and underline aspirations for higher office, as private member bills are often heavily regulated by the party leadership in parliamentary systems. ...
Recent research on executive‐legislative relations in parliamentary democracies has shown that members of majority parties submit amendments to government bills to police the coalition compromise and to distinguish themselves from their coalition partners. It is poorly understood, however, what motivates members of the opposition to engage in the resource‐intensive work of proposing changes to government bills. Not only are amendment proposals by the opposition often unsuccessful (lack of policy motivation), they are largely invisible to the electorate (lack of vote motivation). We argue that amendments by the opposition are best understood as reflecting office motivations of legislators. Ambitious legislators draft amendments to signal skill and expertise to their party peers, which is rewarded with promotions to higher office. We confirm our argument with original data from a large German state parliament. The findings further our understanding of legislative review, individual legislative efforts and career trajectories. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
... For example, legislative speeches seem to influence voters' evaluation of MPs as voters reward more active MPs with more preference votes (Marcinkiewicz and Stegmaier 2019). Parliamentary work, specifically bill initiation, positively affects personal votes in general and especially for opposition MPs (Bouteca et al. 2019;Bowler 2010;Däubler, Bräuninger, and Brunner 2016;Williams and Indridason 2018). Similarly, although voters certainly do not observe legislative voting behavior directly or follow it closely, we propose that information on the aggregate behavior of an opposition party is mediated to the voters, through the media as well as by the politicians themselves (see, e.g., Huber et al. 2020). ...
Scholars frequently expect parties to act strategically in parliament, hoping to affect their electoral fortunes. Voters assumingly assess parties by their activity and vote accordingly. However, the retrospective voting literature looks mostly at the government’s outcomes, leaving the opposition understudied. We argue that, for opposition parties, legislative voting constitutes an effective vote-seeking activity as a signaling tool of their attitude toward the government. We suggest that conflictual voting behavior affects voters through two mechanisms: as a signal of opposition valence and as means of ideological differentiation from the government. We present both aggregate- and individual-level analyses, leveraging a dataset of 169 party observations from 10 democracies and linking it to the CSES survey data of 27,371 respondents. The findings provide support for the existence of both mechanisms. Parliamentary conflict on legislative votes has a general positive effect on opposition parties’ electoral performance, conditional on systemic and party-specific factors.
... Of course, the way that MPs are elected is not the only factor related to career length. While we take various additional or alternative factors into account in our models (eg safety of list position or district seat), previous research has, for example, shown that parliamentary work tends to have an impact on re-selection and re-election (see, eg Bouteca et al., 2019;Bowler, 2010;Crisp et al., 2013;Däubler et al., 2016). It may be that MPs are not randomly assigned as a district or list (or dual) candidate by the selectorates. ...
Mixed-member proportional electoral systems are characterised by having two types of members of parliament (MPs): district MPs elected directly in a district and list MPs elected via a party list. While it has been suggested that district MPs have a more prestigious and safe position than list MPs, little is known about possible differences between list and district MPs in terms of the length of their parliamentary careers. Using data on all New Zealand parliamentary elections between 1996 and 2017, the authors investigate to what extent the mode in which MPs are elected throughout their careers relates to the length of their careers. The authors’ descriptive and multivariate Cox Proportional-Hazards analyses show that those entering parliament as list MPs have shorter careers than those entering parliament as district MPs. However, when list MPs ‘move on’ to becoming district MPs during their parliamentary career, they have the longest careers of all MPs.
... These studies broadly find that, in advanced democracies, working hard in parliaments/congresses is rewarded by voters (Carey and Shugart, 1995;McDermott and Jones, 2003;Papp and Russo, 2018). Sponsoring and initiating bills, for example, is associated with larger vote shares (Bowler, 2010;Däubler et al., 2016;Loewen et al., 2014;Marangoni and Russo, 2018). Legislative reports and oral questions/interpellations or motions also carry an electoral advantage for more productive politicians François and Navarro, 2019;Kellermann, 2013;Marangoni and Russo, 2018). ...
Are European Parliament (EP) elections used to pass judgement on the legislative behaviour of parties serving in the EP? Do Europeans give a bonus in EP elections to political parties whose members were highly active during the legislative term? The article will focus on the role of legislative activities in the eighth EP term (2014–2019) in informing the 2019 vote choice. The analysis combines the European Election Studies (EESs) 2019 Voter Study data with original legislative behaviour data, as well as with data on European electoral systems. The evidence points to productivity-based retrospective voting being a feature of the 2019 elections. Furthermore, the analysis finds that this type of retrospective voting is stronger in countries where electoral rules encourage candidates to promote past legislative records in electoral campaigns, and particularly so for voters that paid attention to the EP campaign in such systems. This has significant implications for the retrospective voting and EU elections literatures, since it is evidence that the very demanding democratic desiderata of retrospection can be met in multi-level and supranational contexts as well.
... the primary interest here is not in bill proposals per se, but in using them as a proxy for MPs' general legislative activity, analogous to the indicators used in the survey experiment described below. even so, previous work has shown that bill initiation has a number of specific benefits as a tool for personal vote seeking, helping to increase MPs' name recognition, approval ratings, and electoral support (däubler, Bräuninger, and Brunner 2016;Loewen et al. 2014;Williams and indriðason 2018). the New Zealand bill ballot thus presents a particularly good opportunity to test how partisanship conditions voters' responses to MPs' parliamentary behavior. ...
Recent work suggests that partisan dealignment should undermine political parties by giving members of Parliament (MPs) greater incentives for personal vote seeking. The key mechanism underlying such arguments is that voters with stronger party ties are less responsive to the records of individual MPs. However, existing tests of this mechanism are largely either indirect, based on responses to rebellious voting or nonlegislative behavior, or drawn from the United States. This article thus provides a new test of whether partisan voters are less responsive to MPs' parliamentary activity. I present two complementary analyses—a natural experiment in New Zealand and a survey experiment in the United Kingdom. Both suggest that more active MPs are more popular, but that this relationship is moderated by voters' partisanship. MPs' parliamentary activity chiefly influences the behavior of voters with the weakest partisanship. This offers new evidence that partisan dealignment heightens legislators’ incentives for personal vote seeking.
... Evidence from a range of countries, including the United Kingdom, shows that legislators with the greatest incentive to cultivate a personal vote are those who propose the most legislation (Bowler, 2010;Bräuninger et al., 2012;Williams and Indridason, 2018). This behaviour also appears to yield electoral returns, with higher bill proposal rates being linked to higher levels of name recognition, better approval ratings and greater electoral support (Bowler, 2010;Däubler et al., 2016;Loewen et al., 2014;Williams and Indridason, 2018). MPs' efforts at proposing legislation therefore constitute a good indicator of their personal vote-seeking activity. ...
What shapes legislators’ incentives for personal vote-seeking in parliament? Recent work suggests that partisanship among voters deters personal vote-seeking, by limiting its effectiveness. This has potentially significant implications for policy-making, election results and patterns of accountability. However, empirical tests of this argument remain few in number and have several limitations. This article thus offers a new test of the relationship between partisanship and personal vote-seeking. Using legislators’ bill proposals as an indicator of their personal vote-seeking activity, I analyse legislative behaviour in the UK House of Commons between 1964 and 2017. I find that members of parliament make more legislative proposals when voters are less partisan. Moreover, partisanship appears to moderate the influence of other drivers of personal vote-seeking: electorally vulnerable legislators make more legislative proposals, but only at low levels of partisanship. These findings provide new evidence that voters’ relationships with political parties affect legislators’ electoral strategies and parliamentary behaviour.
... Research on Belgian parliamentarians shows that voters reward politicians with more independent legislative behavior. Producing more single-authored bills was correlated with more preference votes (Daübler et al., 2016; and similarly in Sweden, see, e.g., Anckar et al., 2001;KU, 2003/04: URD6). Voters were conjectured to be meritocratic in the sense of rewarding more active members of parliament (MPs) or acting on an information channel of favoring MPs whose name they recall from a legislative effort. ...
We study the distribution of preference votes across politicians with different behaviors and attitudes. There are two main findings. First, preference votes are concentrated to politicians who are more active in communicating their policy proposals and policy priorities. This suggests that preference voting may incentivize more transparency and communication among politicians, and, hence, be positive for accountability. Second, preference votes are concentrated to politicians who are more—not less—loyal to the party in their voting decisions, and to politicians who’s ideological and policy positions are mainstream—rather than extreme—compared to their party colleagues. Together with the first finding, this suggests that preference voting can strengthen the bond of accountability between voters and politicians without undercutting parties’ ideological cohesion.
... Using the fact that the right to propose legislation is assigned by a lottery to members of Canadian House of Commons, Loewen, Koop, Settle, and Fowler (2014) demonstrate that bill sponsorship may significantly improve the electoral performance of politicians seeking reelection. In the context of the Belgian flexible-list PR system, Däubler, Bräuninger, and Brunner (2016) find that bills proposed by a single legislator shortly before the election have a strong positive impact on the initiator's electoral performance. Additionally, Crisp et al. (2013) assume that sponsoring bills and amendments may be used by legislators as a way of attracting the attention of voters. ...
In flexible-list proportional representation systems, where voters are allowed to cast candidate preference votes, parties have much control over which candidates win seats. The influence of both party ballot rankings and preference votes, begs the question of whether more active legislators who seek reelection are rewarded by voters. We test this question by analyzing the effects of different types of parliamentary activities on preference votes for four legislative terms of the Czech Chamber of Deputies. Our study differs from most of the previous literature which typically focuses on a single parliamentary term or compares single parliamentary terms across countries. While the relationships between some activities and preference votes vary across the legislative periods, we observe consistency in the positive relationship between frequency of speaking in parliament and preference vote shares. The more sessions legislators speak in, the higher their share of preference votes in the following election.
... It is very unlikely that citizens will vote for candidates they do not know, and the most important source of information about candidates for citizens is the news media (André et al., 2012;Arnold, 2004). Moreover, Däubler et al. (2016) argue that the mentioning of an MP's name causes people to get a preference for that candidate over lesser-known candidates. Meaning that getting into the news is good for getting more votes and thus getting re-elected. ...
Studies have shown that parties selectively emphasize different issues to compete with each other to raise the salience for their preferred issues and to appear competent in handling them. This study applies the selective emphasis framework on individual politicians. We argue that politicians compete with both politicians from different parties as with their party members. We expect that issue ownership matters to compete with politicians from different parties and issue specialization to compete with politicians from their own party. We studied the individual issue agenda of 144 Belgian politicians for a period of 9 months on Twitter, in the news and in parliament. Our results show that issue specialization is a consistent driver of the three issue agendas of politicians, while the effect of issue ownership varies across agendas. This means that both factors are not mutually exclusive and that combining them can be an opportune strategy for politicians.
... To illustrate, around 6000 written questions were posed in 2014, 4000 oral questions in committee meetings and 700 in the plenary debate (De Winter & Wolfs, 2017). Belgium MPs also have considerable leeway to propose legislation, as bills can be introduced by single representatives or a group of deputies at any time (Däubler, Bräuninger, & Brunner, 2016). We focus, however, on single-authored initiatives, which probably reflect individual effort more accurately as legislators have to draft the bill single-handedly and cannot rely on their status or network to be included as co-author. ...
... At the level of the individual legislator, using passed legislation to appeal to voters is difficult, given that the legislative agenda in parliamentary regimes is dominated by the government (Döring, 1995;Mattson, 1995). However, introducing bills and amendments allows subsequent credit-claiming with the electorate, making it possible for a legislator to argue in a re-election campaign that she is hard at work, addressing policy issues of interest to her voters (Box-Steffensmeier et al., 2003;Crisp et al., 2004Crisp et al., , 2013Bowler, 2010;André et al., 2014;Loewen et al., 2014;Däubler et al., 2016). A similar logic applies to giving speeches (Proksch and Slapin, 2012) and asking parliamentary questions (Martin, 2011). ...
The staggered renewal of parliamentary mandates is widespread in upper chambers, yet little understood. Comparative work has found that all members of a chamber are affected by upcoming elections, not merely those whose terms are up for renewal. In this study, we explore for which activities, and under which conditions, staggered membership renewal is associated with class-specific parliamentary activity, defined as systematically differing behaviour across two or more classes of members. We examine these questions with data on the French Senate. Drawing on insights from the study of political business cycles, legislative cycles, and previous scholarship on staggering, the article shows that behaviour varies over the course of senators’ mandates, and that class-specific behaviour exists. However, staggering produces a different pattern of parliamentary activity than might be expected: proximity to elections reduces parliamentary activity of the class of senators facing re-election; by contrast, senators ‘not up next’ become more active. This effect, we argue, reflects the electoral system under which senators are elected.
... 700 in the plenary debate (De Winter and Wolfs, 2017). Belgium MPs also have considerable leeway to propose legislation, as bills can be introduced by single representatives or a group of deputies at any time (Däubler et al., 2016). We focus, however, on single-authored initiatives, which probably reflect individual effort more accurately as legislators have to draft the bill single-handedly and cannot rely on their status or network to be included as co-author. ...
Traditionally, scholars have always assumed that exercising a local political mandate as a national legislator intrinsically interferes with the intra parliamentary output. Despite the intuitive presumption that dual mandate-holders lack sufficient time to fulfil both mandates adequately, empirical support remains scarce and contradictory. Existing research has almost exclusively focused on problematic small samples in the French national assembly, failed to disentangle the generic phenomenon based on the nature of the local function and the context it is being exercised in, and neglected to embed their work in the legislative literature. This contribution aims to cover these shortcomings and assesses whether representatives with a dual mandate are less productive in the Belgian federal parliament during five legislatures between 1995 and 2014. The evidence shows that only mayors from large municipalities are less preoccupied with formal parliamentary endeavours, which refines the traditional pessimistic premise that cumul des mandats unambiguously cripples parliamentary activism and instead opens up the possibility for a more optimistic perspective.
... How legislators define their constituents shapes both the input and the output side of politics (Rehfeld 2005;Bishin 2000Bishin , 2009. Their representational foci affect opportunities for political participation since they prescribe what kinds of demands gain access to politics and whom voters pay attention to (e. g. Däubler et al. 2016). Legislators' representational foci also influence the nature of the issues that shape the process of authoritative decision making, specifically the extent to which these involve local or rather national concerns (e.g . ...
Political representation in European democracies is widely considered partisan and collectivist. This article, however, stresses that there is more to the representative process in European democracies than just its textbook version. It emphasizes the role of geographic representation as a complementary strategy in party‐dominated legislatures that is characterized by two distinct features. First, legislators employ distinct opportunities to participate in legislative contexts to signal attention to geographic constituents without disrupting party unity. Second, these activities are motivated by individual‐ and district‐level characteristics that supplement electoral‐system‐level sources of geographic representation. We empirically test and corroborate this argument for the German case on the basis of a content analysis of parliamentary questions in the 17th German Bundestag (2009–13). In this analysis, we show that higher levels of localness among legislators and higher levels of electoral volatility in districts result in increased geographic representation.
... Under this definition, many different individual attributes can be labelled as PVEA and emphasized by candidates in their personalized campaign strategies to make themselves known among voters (Gschwend and Zittel, 2015). Related literature has, for instance, mentioned name recognition through parliamentary activity (Däubler et al., 2016), celebrity status as television personality (Arter, 2014) or sports career (Nemoto and Shugart, 2013), physical attractiveness (Rosar et al., 2008), or family ties to a previous politician (Horiuchi et al., 2018). ...
This article investigates the effect of candidates exhibiting local personal vote-earning attributes (PVEA) on the aggregate party vote share at the district level. Previous research has often assumed that packing ballot lists with localized candidates increases the aggregate party vote and seat shares. We present a strict empirical test of this argument by analysing the relative electoral swing of ballot lists at the district level, a measure of change in party vote shares which controls for the national party trend and previous party results in the district. The analysis is based on data of 7527 candidacies during six Belgian regional and federal election cycles between 2003 and 2014, which is aggregated to an original data set of 223 ballot lists. The ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models do not show a significant effect of candidates exhibiting local PVEA on relative electoral swing of ballot lists. However, the results suggest that ballot lists do benefit electorally if candidates with local PVEA are geographically distributed over different municipalities in the district.
... The PR system emphasises the importance of the party, as voters cannot identify with one representative but rather with (representatives under) one party label. However, as the electoral system gives voters the option to cast preference votes, the electoral fate of candidates does not solely rely on the party itself but also on candidates' specific traits and even on their parliamentary activity record (Däubler et al. 2016). In their seminal article, Carey and Shugart (1995) ...
This chapter makes a unique contribution to the study of representational roles by extending the population of interest beyond elected legislators. It focuses on understanding how candidates conceive their role as representatives taking as vantage point the focus and the style of representation, the key dimensions in the classical literature on legislative roles. The authors show how candidates’ role conception is likely to be influenced by their own personal characteristics and ambitions for (re)selection and (re)election, as well as by their relationship with the party itself and voters. Ultimately, this chapter brings attention to candidates as individuals, in a context where parties are usually considered as the main actors in the representation process, and politicians mostly conceived as party agents.
... taking positions that are popular with them and signalling being hard at work (Bowler 2010;Box-Steffensmeier et al. 2003;Crisp et al. 2013;Däubler, Bräuninger, and Brunner 2016;Loewen et al. 2014). ...
This paper analyses how the size and socio-economic diversity of their electorate affect parliamentarians’ legislative behaviour. We study the Australian senate, which wields considerable legislative influence and is marked by large differences in the size and socio-economic makeup of the districts that senators represent. We demonstrate that as the size of their district increases, senators ask more questions and introduce more bills and amendments. By contrast, senators become less active as the diversity of their electoral district increases. The paper thus establishes that size and diversity of electorates have significant effects on legislative behaviour.
... Further step would be to analyse whether such initiatives by individual MPs boost incumbents' electoral performance, as, for example, Däubler et al. (2016) found was the case in Belgium. ...
The Finnish open list electoral system provides strong incentives for MPs to cultivate ties with their constituents. There is arguably more competition for seats within than between parties, with election campaigns revolving around individual candidates. Examining how Finnish parliamentarians carry out constituency service, this article argues that such contacts are increasingly non-partisan and geared either towards the ‘home turf’ or specific policy interests. Cross-partisan cooperation among MPs from the same electoral district is institutionalised in the Eduskunta. There is surprisingly little variation between the 200 MPs regarding the level and types of constituency service, irrespective of district magnitude, the safety of the seat or parliamentary experience. Constituency service is clearly a key element of MPs’ work and forms an essential part of their re-election strategies.
... The interaction of district magnitude with list type is a crucial element linking voters reacting to personal vote-seeking in elections (Canache et al., 2000;Carey and Shugart, 1995;Grimmer et al., 2012), to politicians' identities (Shugart et al., 2005) and behaviour in parliament (André and Depauw, 2013;André et al., 2014;Chang and Golden, 2006;Crisp et al., 2004;Däubler et al., 2016;Stratmann and Baur, 2002), to ultimately holding legislators to account (Mitchell, 2000). Understanding the effect of district magnitude on voters' information is crucial, as it affects strategic voting (Cox, 1997;Gschwend, 2009;Lachat et al., 2015), as well as which parties receive more support (Blumenau et al., 2016) and satisfaction with democracy (Curtice and Shively, 2009;Farrell and Mcallister, 2006). ...
District magnitude and list type shape the incentives for politicians to develop a personal vote. If voters also react to these strategies, their knowledge about candidates should be influenced by these features of the electoral system. This article directly tests the responsiveness of voters by employing individual-level survey data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. As district magnitude increases, more people remember at least one candidate in closed list systems, but there is no such effect in open list systems. These influences are also larger for non-voters than for voters. A measure of political contact is not affected in this way. The differential effect of district magnitude can be explained by a different campaign focus.
... A number of scholars find that in systems which are more personalized, such as systems with preferential voting, parliamentarians show more signs of personal-vote seeking legislative behavior (Br?uninger, Brunner, & D?ubler, 2012;Carey & Shugart, 1995;Crisp et al., 2004). A recent study tests more specifically whether the legislative behavior of MPs impact their electoral results, concluding that especially MPs initiating single- authored law proposals shortly before the elections obtain more personal votes (D?ubler, Br?uninger, & Brunner, 2016). In the end, the reason why the behavior of parliamentarians was not included in this dissertation is that its focus lies on all candidates rather than only parliamentarians. ...
While existing studies have addressed the importance of political profile for media visibility, far fewer works have examined how speaking in parliament is associated with media attention—an important mechanism in reaching out to voters. This paper tests how the amount and particularly the style of parliamentary speech are related to media attention. We employ a unique data set that covers all parliamentary transcripts for the 2011–2015 and 2015–2019 parliamentary terms in Estonia and online media content from that period (~ 2.7 million news articles). We assume that MPs can use parliamentary speech as a tool to foster personal attention. First, the results show that MPs who speak in parliament receive more media attention than those who do not, and speaking more means more media visibility. Second, the media pays more attention to rank‐and‐file MPs who use more negative, complex language and more singular and plural first‐person pronouns.
Our knowledge about how voters decide which candidate(s) to vote for under preferential-list proportional representation (PLPR) systems remains limited. In particular, it is debated whether incumbent MPs enjoy an electoral advantage over outsiders also under PLPR. We argue that such an incumbency advantage critically depends on candidate visibility (in the media) and differs across voters with varying levels of political knowledge. Our empirical analysis combines candidate information with rich individual-level voting data collected via “mock ballots” in the 2014 Belgian PartiRep election study. We show that the vote premium linked to incumbency increases with increasing media visibility, and while high-visibility incumbents outperform incumbents among the entire electorate, low-visibility incumbents enjoy an advantage only among knowledgeable voters. The results contribute to a better understanding of candidate voting and the incumbency advantage in PLPR. They also have implications for campaign strategies and the regulation of media access.
This article examines whether political parties reward the parliamentary activity of members of parliament (MPs) through candidate selection processes. Previous research on this question provides mixed evidence. Moreover, studies often disregard potentially unequal effects among different kinds of MPs. Using new data on all members of the Belgian Chamber of Representatives between 1995 and 2019 (N = 1108), this contribution shows that several types of parliamentary activity indeed matter both for MPs’ general renomination as well as for their claim to realistic list positions. Furthermore, our study provides evidence that parliamentary activity matters more for the reselection of newcomers than for experienced MPs.
Prior research reveals a relationship between various political system outputs and the citizens’ satisfaction with democracy (SWD). The current study contributes to this line of inquiry and demonstrates that the perception of the district legislators’ overall performance positively correlates with the citizens’ democratic satisfaction. The multivariate analysis of Hungarian panel data from 2018 reveals that the effect is most salient in the case of the winners of the election, and less so for the losers. Results are robust to a variety of changes in the model. The findings indicate that the focus on individual politicians and their work has the potential to increase democratic satisfaction even if representative political institutions such as parties, governments and parliaments are not able to win the citizens’ trust.
Although often theorized, empirical research on the relationship between MPs’ parliamentary behaviour and their chances to realize career ambitions is relatively scarce. This article holistically analyses the effect of MPs’ (1) party loyalty, (2) activity level and (3) the quality of their parliamentary work on MPs’ prospects for re-election and their promotion to higher parliamentary office. Based on a unique combination of behavioural and peer assessment data on 325 federal and regional MPs in Belgium (2014–2019), we find that particularly MPs’ loyalty and activity level improve their career prospects in the subsequent term, in contrast to more qualitative aspects of their parliamentary work. These findings provide important new insights into how and to what degree legislators are rewarded for their parliamentary performance.
In this study, we examine how the security of tenure (proxied by both inter- and intra-party electoral advantage) affects the engagement and political performance of members of parliament (MPs). Using data from the lower chamber of parliament in Poland for the period 2005–2019, we provide evidence that intra-party electoral advantage correlates with MPs’ efforts and political performance. A more secured position of an MP vis-à-vis their co-partisans leads to a decrease in the number of parliamentary speeches, statements, interpellations, and lower voting turnout. Therefore, it appears that MPs whose political survival is less uncertain work less hard than MPs with a more precarious future.
Taking advantage of the new data available from the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, I examine whether members of the House of Commons can craft a reputation for constituency service with how they allocate their office allowances and the types of Early Day Motions (EDMs) they sponsor. Combining information on the costs of holding surgeries and the sponsorship of constituency service EDMs with the fourth wave of the 2015 British Election Study, I find that increased attention to constituency service through more spending on surgeries and sponsoring constituency EDMs helps MPs build positive reputations among citizens as constituent servants.
Although evaluations of members of parliaments’ (MPs) parliamentary work have gained increasing public popularity, the academic literature on the concept and measurement of parliamentary performance is surprisingly scarce. Most studies analysing (aspects of) MPs’ parliamentary performance focus on quantitative parliamentary activity indicators only, thereby neglecting the quality and effectiveness of parliamentary work, and the importance of less visible parliamentary activities. This article introduces a conceptual framework of parliamentary performance as well as a more encompassing measurement approach, and provides a first empirical test of theoretically expected underlying dimensions on 325 Belgian MPs. This study proposes an innovative method relying on the collective expertise of MPs through peer assessment while controlling for potential rater effects. I demonstrate that parliamentary performance cannot be captured by parliamentary activity indicators alone. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses show that apart from three factors of parliamentary activity, two more qualitative factors (content and policy-making effectiveness) can be identified. The results suggest that future evaluations of MPs’ parliamentary work may need to include more qualitative elements.
The importance of minority parliamentarians for substantive representation is widely acknowledged, but little research exists on further explanations. By studying the substantive representation of the interests of lesbians, gays, and bisexuals (LGBs), this study analyses why parliamentarians stand in for interests of minorities with an invisible characteristic. A quantitative content analysis of more than 950,000 British and Irish parliamentary questions provides the basis for the analysis (2002–2017). The study considers parliamentarians’ characteristics as explanatory factors. The results indicate that parliamentary presence is vital for LGBs. However, the most active parliamentarians are non-minority members: political values and awareness are also at play. Moreover, there are differences between the two parliaments.
We develop a new framework to study legislative representation in list proportional representation (PR) systems. Our model studies a legislator's incentives to balance the competing interests of party leaders and local voters under a variety of list PR systems. We consider open and closed lists, as well as flexible lists—in which both rank assignments and preference votes determine the order in which seats are filled. We find that more flexibility can worsen local representation. List flexibility also acts as a key mediator of the effect of voter partisanship on party cohesion. And, our analysis reveals that higher district magnitude encourages representatives to toe the party line under all ballot systems.
This article examines factors that influence voters’ knowledge of their representatives, a key element in securing the responsiveness and accountability of parliamentarians. We argue that the parliamentary work of MPs (Members of Parliament) benefits incumbents through increased name recall, and that this relationship is conditional on: the incumbents’ candidacy; the voters’ political competence; and their ideological proximity with their representatives. Combining data on French MPs’ activities with a 2007 CSES post‐election survey enables us to test our hypotheses, while controlling for confounding factors. The empirical analysis demonstrates that some parliamentary activities increase the voters’ capacity to recall the name of their MPs. The latter are therefore incentivised to be responsive to and serve their constituents. However, we also find that voters’ political competence and ideological proximity with their MP alter the relationship between parliamentary work and name recall. This may potentially introduce some biases in the democratic process of accountability.
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This study examines the evolving role of parliamentary committees in legislative decision-making and their relationships with external actors when amending bills. Drawing on resource dependence theory and informational perspectives on parliamentary committees, we analyse the impact of information provided by business interest organizations, public interest groups, and experts in the German Bundestag’s public hearings in 2004, 2007, and 2011. Using a text-reuse approach to capture legislative amendments, we assess the influence of different information types in explaining such changes. Our results show that the Bundestag often amends government proposals, and that interest groups’ positions and experts’ evidence must be considered when explaining such amendments. We demonstrate that parliament is more responsive to business pressure than to public interest groups, which are heavily dependent on political allies in governing parties. Finally, we show that expert advice can inform policy-makers and legitimize government bills, but can also disempower public interest groups.
Previous research suggests that bill initiation is a mechanism used by legislators to foster personal votes. This article puts forward a theory whereby legislative activity is understood as a form of party service. Bill initiation records are used by parties to inform their decisions on who is ready to be promoted. The theory is evaluated using an original data-set from the Chilean Chamber of Deputies. Our empirical findings make a strong case for the hypothesis according to which parties reward those deputies who have shown to be effective legislators.
In this article, we analyse how the degree of parliamentary activity affects both individual MPs’ performance in the candidate selection process within the party and their popularity with voters at the electoral stage. We expect that parliamentary work of MPs matters less for voters’ evaluations of MPs because of limited monitoring capacities and lower salience attached to this type of representation. The empirical analysis uses data from recent elections in the Czech Republic and Sweden. During the analysed period, these countries further personalised their flexible list electoral systems. Our results suggest that parties hold MPs accountable mainly through the threat of non-re-selection rather than by assigning them to a promising list position. While there is no evidence that voters consistently reward MPs’ effort, the case of the Czech elections in 2010 shows that they may do so if context draws attention to individual MPs’ work. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Hansard Society; all rights reserved.
The ‘best of both worlds’ thesis contends that mixed-member electoral systems should provide individual legislator accountability via single-member district (SMD) elections, as well as collective party accountability via a multi-member district (MMD) tier. This study evaluates the mandate divide and electoral connection under the Welsh mixed-member proportional system of representation during the 3rd (2007–11) and 4th (2011–16) Assemblies. Consistent with the best of both worlds thesis, electorally vulnerable SMD legislators are found to make more member bill attempts, and those whose member bills are randomly selected for introduction enjoy a significant boost in their electoral margin of victory. There is some evidence that MMD legislators are rewarded by their party selectorates for member bill efforts with a move up the party list, although this result is less robust. An additional check confirms the absence of contamination across electoral tiers.
Parliamentarians greatly differ with regard to the amount and quality of their work in parliament. Students of legislator behaviour mostly view Members of Parliament (MPs) as ‘single-minded seekers of re-election’, which is often argued to be the motivation for carrying out various activities. However, less attention has been paid to what extent MPs’ efforts pay off at the next elections. The special section introduced here addresses the question if the type and volume of parliamentary activities carried out by legislators have any effect on their electoral prospects. In other words, do parties and voters take MPs’ activity record into account when deciding on the re-election and the re-selection of an incumbent? To shed some light on this topic, we bring together students of legislative and electoral behaviour from all parts of Europe. Our general aim is to disentangle the necessary conditions for personal accountability to work in representative democracies.
This article explores whether differential time horizons in legislative chambers that result from staggered membership renewal affect legislative behaviour. The analysis focuses on patterns of bill initiation and the introduction of amendments in the upper chambers of Australia, France, Germany and Japan – all four of which contain two or more classes of members that face re-election at different times. Drawing on original comparative data, clear evidence is found of over-time variation in legislative activity levels in the upper chambers. Approaching elections lead to increased activity levels, with increases in the introduction of bills, but also, to a lesser extent, amending activity. Such variation is found not only for those members facing the most proximate election, but for all members of the chamber. Importantly, there are no significant differences in legislative behaviour between those members up for re-election and those not facing the electorate in the most proximate election. These patterns are interpreted tentatively as evidence of the paramount importance of political parties in parliamentary systems.
Conventional accounts of British politics play down the electoral importance of MPs' actions in the House of Commons. Party, it is assumed, is the key feature in shaping voters' preferences: few voters are aware of how their local representative voted on a particular issue, and in any case most MPs vote along party lines. On occasion, however, MPs do vote against the party line. Where the issue involved commands considerable public interest, this may raise an individual MP's profile with his or her constituents, with consequent effects upon future electoral prospects. This article investigates the connection between MPs' votes on a series of free votes and rebellions during the 1987 Parliament and their share of the vote in the 1992 general election. Generally, Conservative MPs' actions in the Commons had no effect on their subsequent share of the popular vote. However where an issue was of marked public interest, such as capital punishment or the poll tax, how the MPs voted did exert a small but discernible effect on the support that they received in 1992.
This article analyses the decision of Belgian voters to cast a preference vote on the occasion of the 2009 regional elections. And what appears is that preference votes could be given three meanings. First, preference voting appears to be a sophisticated voting behaviour more accessible to politically interested and involved voters. Less politically active voters more often limit themselves to marking their ballot on the top of the list without differentiating their support among candidates. Second, preference voting is very much a token of voter–candidate proximity. Voters are more likely to support candidates when they know one or several specific candidates directly or via the media. Finally, preference voting is also very much dependent on the structure of institutional incentives. The more influence a preference vote has on the process of intra-party seat allocation, the more likely voters are to make the effort. All in all, this article shows the diversity of motivations behind preference voting, and more importantly the different meanings it could take in elections.
We examine factors that influence whether or not constituents know and like their representative in Congress, exploring how constituents respond to very different forms of political representation—descriptive, symbolic, and allocational—provided by House members. We compare the relative contribution that non-policy representational factors make to the electoral advantage that incumbents enjoy among their constituents. The statistical analysis demonstrates that several non-policy aspects of the representational relationship, including descriptive correspondence and the member’s legislative activity, benefit the incumbent through increased name recognition and, ultimately, in voters’ choices at the voting booth.
Constituency campaigns are important phenomena for students of political parties, voting behaviour as well as political communication. These research communities perceive constituency campaigns as parts of centralised high-tech campaigns aiming in strategic ways at the efficient mobilisation of voters. We propose in this paper an alternative understanding of constituency campaigns using the case of the German parliamentary elections in 2005 to empirically test this understanding. We perceive constituency campaigns as phenomena signalling a relative independence of individual candidates from the national party campaign. We label this phenomenon individualised campaigning. We argue that individualised campaigning is driven among others by electoral incentives. We test this hypothesis with regard to the German mixed-member electoral system and on the basis of a survey of all candidates standing for election in 2005.
Most of the time, electoral reforms are seen as decisions taken by political players aiming at increasing their seat share.1 According to Benoit's model, parties rank reform plans according to whether they maximize their share of seats (Benoit, 2004). In that respect, the decision of the Belgian government to change district boundaries for the 2003 federal elections is rather strange, as the reform adopted has no mechanical impact on the allocation of seats among parties. This does not, however, mean that this redistricting is one of the few reforms not driven by strategic considerations. Belgian parties are driven by other forms of strategy lying under the surface. As a matter of fact, four power-related elements have played a part in the decision to change district boundaries. Firstly, the change to province constituencies was made to reduce the uncertainty of parliamentary careers caused by the two-tier system in use up to 2003. Secondly, promoters of redistricting tried to introduce a new campaign structure, which they hoped would be more appropriate for their party. Thirdly, large parties required to introduce a 5% threshold jointly to the redistricting. The threshold was meant to block smaller parties and consequently to favour larger ones. And finally redistricting was also pushed by centralized parties expecting this reform to increase their control over decentralized party structures. All these strategies show that in the study of electoral reform, political science will have to go beyond merely considering its impact on each party's share of seats.Comparative European Politics (2007) 5, 205–225. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cep.6110094
This study departs from the finding that media attention contributed to the electoral success of candidates in the Belgian election campaign of 2003. While the authors do find an impact of media attention on the number of preferential votes for each candidate, in this study they take a closer look at the elements that determine this media attention. Do the media autonomously decide which candidate gets more attention than others or do they follow the hierarchy determined by the parties? In other words: is the media's interest in a politician a consequence of a media logic or of a party logic? As the study's multivariate analysis clearly indicates, both logics are relevant, with the party logic outweighing the media logic. However, the question remains to what extent the parties have already incorporated a media logic in the selection of their political personnel.
In countries with a majoritarian electoral system, the expenses of challengers are generally found to have a stronger effect on the electoral outcome than the expenses of incumbents. Research on campaign expenditure effects in Brazil suggests that this is not the case in countries with an open list PR system and large districts. This hypothesis is confirmed by an analysis of the effect of individual campaign expenses on the number of preferential votes in the 2003 legislative elections in Flanders/Belgium. An analysis of high quality candidates shows that the expenses have a substantial effect on the vote which does not vary according to incumbency status. However, the effect of media exposure on the vote is stronger than and largely independent of the effect of campaign expenses.
Particularistic spending, a large literature argues, builds support for incumbents. This literature equates money spent in the district with the credit constituents allocate. Yet, constituents lack the necessary information and motivation to allocate credit this way. We use extensive observational and experimental evidence to show how legislators’ credit claiming messages—and not just money spent in the district—affect how constituents allocate credit. Legislators use credit claiming messages to influence the expenditures they receive credit for and to affect how closely they are associated with spending in the district. Constituents are responsive to credit claiming messages–they build more support than other non-partisan messages. But contrary to expectations from other studies, constituents are more responsive to the total number of messages sent rather than the amount claimed. Our results have broad implications for political representation and the study of U.S. Congressional elections.
The Belgian party-archy violates the ideal-type chain of parliamentary delegation in many ways, insofar as political parties play a predominant role at each stage. They channel the delegation of power from voters to MPs, from Parliament to the cabinet, from the collective cabinet to individual ministers, and from ministers to their civil servants. Hence, they can be considered the effective principals in the polity, and many actors of the parliamentary chain of delegation, such as MPs, ministers, and civil servants have been reduced to mere party agents. The extreme fragmentation of the Belgian party system in combination with its increasing need for multilevel coordination have further enhanced the position of political parties in the Belgian polity. Yet, at the same time (since the early 1990s), Belgium has also witnessed a gradual decline in the informal system of partitocratic delegation and clientelistic excesses, thereby giving back part of their autonomy to some formal agents, such as the cabinet, top civil servants and some MPs. Still, one can wonder whether these corrections are sufficient to counter the strong outburst of public dissatisfaction with the way parties have run the country in past decades.
Private Members' Bills are a small but significant part of the UK parliament's legislative work. Many are proposed but few pass into law. This article argues that Private Members' legislation has a broad analogy to constituency service behaviour. In making legislative proposals MPs can cast themselves as active and caring representatives and, in consequence, MPs who make proposals receive a small but significant increase in vote share. This electoral connection also prompts MPs from more marginal seats to be more active in proposing Private Members' Bills.
HYPOTHESIZES THAT MERE REPEATED EXPOSURE OF THE INDIVIDUAL TO A STIMULUS OBJECT ENHANCES HIS ATTITUDE TOWARD IT. BY "MERE" EXPOSURE IS MEANT A CONDITION MAKING THE STIMULUS ACCESSIBLE TO PERCEPTION. SUPPORT FOR THE HYPOTHESIS CONSISTS OF 4 TYPES OF EVIDENCE, PRESENTED AND REVIEWED: (1) THE CORRELATION BETWEEN AFFECTIVE CONNOTATION OF WORDS AND WORD FREQUENCY, (2) THE EFFECT OF EXPERIMENTALLY MANIPULATED FREQUENCY OF EXPOSURE UPON THE AFFECTIVE CONNOTATION OF NONSENSE WORDS AND SYMBOLS, (3) THE CORRELATION BETWEEN WORD FREQUENCY AND THE ATTITUDE TO THEIR REFERENTS, AND (4) THE EFFECTS OF EXPERIMENTALLY MANIPULATED FREQUENCY OF EXPOSURE ON ATTITUDE. THE RELEVANCE FOR THE EXPOSURE-ATTITUDE HYPOTHESIS OF THE EXPLORATION THEORY AND OF THE SEMANTIC SATIATION FINDINGS WERE EXAMINED. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).
The electoral system is an important factor influencing female representation in Parliament. There is a consensus that a proportional representation (PR) system is more beneficial for women than a majoritarian system. Since there is a lot of variety in PR systems and since recent literature suggests that how actors cope with institutional provisions should be looked at more closely, we have investigated why women receive fewer votes in an open-list PR system. More in particular, it was our aim to find out whether women receive fewer votes because of voter bias or systemic bias. We have analyzed three variables influenced by systemic actors (parties, society and media) that have a substantial effect on the number of votes: media attention, campaign expenditures and list position. Our analysis of the 2003 federal Belgian elections shows that women are disadvantaged on these three variables and that as a consequence they obtain fewer votes. There is no voter bias, but a systemic bias. These disadvantages can be due either to individual characteristics influenced by education and society (less ambition, less convinced of capabilities, and so on) or, more importantly, to party- or media-related factors (a.o. list composition, designation of campaign budgets and spokespersons).
In the past, economic integration in Europe was largely compatible with the preservation of different national varieties of capitalism. While product market integration intensified competition, member states could build on and foster their respective comparative advantage. Today, this no longer unequivocally holds true. This article contends that a new, 'post-Ricardian' phase of European integration has emerged in which the Commission's and the European Court of Justice's (ECJ's) attempts to promote economic integration systematically challenge the institutions of organised capitalism. It demonstrates this by discussing recent disputes over the Services Directive, the Takeover Directive, and company law. In the current phase of European integration, the Commission's and the ECJ's liberalisation attempts either transform the institutional foundations on which some of the member states' economic systems rely or they create political resistance to an extent that challenges the viability of the European project.
Despite a sophisticated understanding of the impact of electoral institutions on macrolevel political behavior, little is known about the relationship between these institutions and microlevel legislative behavior. This article reviews existing claims about this relationship and develops a model for predicting how electoral institutions affect the relationship between parliamentarians and their party principals in the context of the European Parliament. The European Parliament is an ideal laboratory for investigating these effects, because in each European Union member state, different institutions are used to elect Members of European Parliament (MEPs). The results of this model, tested on four hundred thousand individual MEP vote decisions, show that candidate-centered electoral systems (such as open-list proportional representation or single-transferable-vote systems) and decentralized candidate-selection rules produce parliamentarians independent from their party principals. By contrast, party-centered electoral systems (such as closed-list proportional representation systems) and centralized candidate-selection rules produce parliamentarians beholden to the parties that fight elections and choose candidates: in the case of the European Parliament, the national parties.
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This paper analyses, in a simple two-region model, the undertaking of noxious facilities when the central government has limited prerogatives. The central government decides whether to construct a noxious facility in one of the regions, and how to …nance it. We study this problem under both full and asymmetric information on the damage caused by the noxious facility in the host region. We particularly emphasize the role of the central government prerogatives on the optimal allocations. We …nally discuss our results with respect to the previous literature on NIMBY and argue that taking into account these limited prerogatives is indeed important.
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Electoral systems are the central political institution in representative democracies. They convert votes into seats and structure the choices facing voters. They also affect the behaviour of political parties, individual MPs, and candidates. This book looks at three kinds of issues. First, it focuses on the 'political science of electoral systems', that is, it joins the canon of works that have attempted to explore various relationships between electoral systems on the one hand and 'outputs' such as government formation, the behaviour of political actors, the representativeness of parliaments, and the quality of governance. Second, while quite a lot is known about generic families of electoral systems, such as 'plurality rule' or 'proportional representation', much less is known about variation within these broad types and how exactly a given electoral system 'really works' in a particular country. Thus, the book includes detailed studies of the operation of electoral systems in 22 countries. Third, it studies the 'politics of electoral systems'. It treats each country's electoral system as, potentially at least, constituting a political issue in its own right. It establishes the reasons behind the initial adoption of an electoral system and discusses who supports the current electoral system and who opposes it, who benefits from it and who loses out, reviewing the current debate in each country on the question of electoral reform. This highlights issues relevant to normative debates about which electoral systems 'work well' and which do not, which ones operate uncontentiously, and which ones are a focus of division in the countries employing them. It reviews these questions by in-depth studies of 22 countries - chosen to represent a range of different electoral systems and located in all continents of the world - along with a number of chapters supplying comparative analysis.
This paper presents evidence that candidate issue positions have a measurable impact on elections for the U.S. House of Representatives. For eight election years, electoral margins of Northern incumbent congressional candidates were examined to test the proposition that “moderates” within each party are better vote getters than those whose roll call records reflect their party's ideological extreme. The effects of roll call positions on election results were estimated by examining the relationships between roll call “extremism” and vote margins with district presidential voting held constant as a control for normal constituency voting habits. Although no strong support was found for the proposition that Democratic Representatives lose electoral support when they take extremely liberal roll call positions, a clear pattern emerged for Republicans: the Republican Congressmen who are the best vote getters tend to be the relative moderates and liberals who avoid the extreme conservative end of the political spectrum. An analysis of survey data suggests that the small group of voters whose electoral decisions are influenced by their Republican Congressman's roll call performance are found within the ranks of a select group who are both free of strong partisan motivations and highly politically informed.
Using returns from the 1978 congressional elections, we estimate the effects of three strategies that incumbents may use to increase their vote totals and improve their reelection prospects: (1) the provision of particularized service to constituents--the casework hypothesis, (2) ideological positioning to represent the policy preferences of the district, and (3) legislative activism, defined as appearing on the floor and introducing bills. Using multiple regression to control for the effects of district partisan composition, district socioeconomic status (SES), the member's seniority, and national partisan swings, we find that casework has no statistically significant effect and further find that a substantively important effect is unlikely, given our estimates. Ideological positioning shows effects that are statistically significant and large enough to substantially affect a member's reelection prospects. Finally, some aspects of legislative activism seem to pay off for incumbents. Analysis of the Center for Political Studies (CPS) 1978 National Election Study data confirms the aggregate results, shows small but statistically significant effects from pork barreling, and distinguishes two types of issue-oriented voting.
The 1978 CPS national election study, which includes many new questions about congressional candidates, is analyzed to discern what voters know about congressional candidates and why House incumbents are so successful at getting reelected by wide margins. Scholars have underestimated the level of public awareness of congressional candidates, primarily because of faulty measures. Voters are often able to recognize and evaluate individual candidates without being able to recall their names from memory. Incumbents are both better known and better liked than challengers, largely because they have the resources enabling them to communicate with their constituents frequently and directly. Yet the seriousness of the challenger is equally important for understanding the advantages of incumbency and why incumbency is less valuable in the Senate than in the House. Finally, public assessments of the president provide a national dynamic to congressional voting, but the effect is modest compared to the salience of the local choices.
Models designed for limited dependent variables are increasingly common in political science. Researchers estimating such models often give little attention to the coefficient estimates and instead focus on marginal effects, predicted probabilities, predicted counts, etc. Since the models are nonlinear, the estimated effects are sensitive to how one generates the predictions. The most common approach involves estimating the effect for the “average case.” But this approach creates a weaker connection between the results and the larger goals of the research enterprise and is thus less preferable than the observed‐value approach. That is, rather than seeking to understand the effect for the average case, the goal is to obtain an estimate of the average effect in the population. In addition to the theoretical argument in favor of the observed‐value approach, we illustrate via an empirical example and Monte Carlo simulations that the two approaches can produce substantively different results.
It is well known that different types of electoral systems create different incentives to cultivate a personal vote and that there may be variation in intra‐party competition within an electoral system. This article demonstrates that flexible list systems – where voters can choose to cast a vote for the list as ordered by the party or express preference votes for candidates – create another type of variation in personal vote‐seeking incentives within the system. This variation arises because the flexibility of party‐in‐a‐district lists results from voters' actual inclination to use preference votes and the formal weight of preference votes in changing the original list order. Hypotheses are tested which are linked to this logic for the case of Belgium, where party‐in‐a‐district constituencies vary in their use of preference votes and the electoral reform of 2001 adds interesting institutional variation in the formal impact of preference votes on intra‐party seat allocation. Since formal rules grant Belgian MPs considerable leeway in terms of bill initiation, personal vote‐seeking strategies are inferred by examining the use of legislative activity as signalling tool in the period between 1999 and 2007. The results establish that personal vote‐seeking incentives vary with the extent to which voters use preference votes and that this variable interacts with the weight of preference votes as defined by institutional rules. In addition, the article confirms the effect of intra‐party competition on personal vote‐seeking incentives and illustrates that such incentives can underlie the initiation of private members bills in a European parliamentary system.
Does lawmaker behavior influence electoral outcomes? Observational studies cannot elucidate the effect of legislative proposals on electoral outcomes, since effects are confounded by unobserved differences in legislative and political skill. We take advantage of a unique natural experiment in the Canadian House of Commons that allows us to estimate how proposing legislation affects election outcomes. The right of noncabinet members to propose legislation is assigned by lottery. Comparing outcomes between those who were granted the right to propose and those who were not, we show that incumbents of the governing party enjoy a 2.7 percentage point bonus in vote total in the election following their winning the right to introduce a single piece of legislation, which translates to a 7% increase in the probability of winning. The causal effect results from higher likeability among constituents. These results demonstrate experimentally that what politicians do as lawmakers has a causal effect on electoral outcomes.
In theory, flexible list systems are a compromise between closed-list and open-list proportional representation. A party's list of candidates can be reordered by voters if the number of votes cast for an individual candidate exceeds some quota. Because these barriers to reordering are rarely overcome, these systems are often characterized as basically closed-list systems. Paradoxically, in many cases, candidates are increasingly earning individual-level preference votes. Using data from Slovakia, we show that incumbents cultivate personal reputations because parties reward preference vote earning candidates with better pre-election list positions in the future. Ironically, the party's vote-earning strategy comes at a price, as incumbents use voting against the party on the chamber floor to generate the reputations that garner preference votes.
What is the value of non—roll call position taking in Congress? The authors argue that non—roll call positions are used by interest groups to acquire information about the direction and intensity of legislators’ preferences. Legislators, in turn, use them to attract campaign contributions from potential donors. Examining bill sponsorship in the 103rd and 104th Congresses, the authors find a relationship between campaign contributions from labor and gun control political action committees and the positions House Democrats take through bill sponsorship. These results suggest that non—roll call position taking indeed matters.
A comprehensive review of the literature on electoral systems establishes the progress made in the field in recent years. This area of political science research can now be regarded as a mature field. Questions concerning the relationships between electoral systems, proportionality, and the number of political parties in a party system (often summed up in terms of Duverger's Law, or variants thereof) can now be regarded as largely settled. Important questions for future research include the intraparty dimension of electoral systems, and the origins of electoral systems.
This paper develops a theory of candidate strategy from social-choice principles and from the workings of open-list proportional representation. The theory is used to explain the campaign behavior and the spatial patterns of vote distribution for candidates to the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies. Campaign strategy is evaluated with models that predict where deputies will offer budget amendments to benefit target municipalities whose votes they seek in subsequent elections. The choice of target municipalities is a function of the cost of erecting barriers to entry, the dominance of the deputy in the municipality, the spatial concentration of the deputy's statewide vote, the vulnerability of the municipality to invasion by outsiders, the weakness of the deputy in the last election, and the deputy's prior political career. Logistic regression of amendments to the Brazilian national budget in 1989 and 1990 and OLS regression of municipal-level electoral results for the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies in the 1990 elections. Deputies seek secure bailiwicks, search for vulnerable municipalities, and strive to overcome their own electoral weakness by delivering pork. Candidates' tactics vary, partly because political backgrounds differ and partly because the differing demographic and economic contexts of Brazilian states reward some tactics and penalize others. Candidate behavior hinders voter control over deputies, increases incentives for pork seeking, and weakens party programs and discipline.
The growing literature on personal vote assumes that candidates with strong local ties should be more successful electorally and more likely to break party unity in parliament. Using unique data from Estonia on candidates' personal vote-earning attributes, such as local birthplace and local-level political experience, this research note offers the first direct test of both of these assumptions. I find that candidates with local-level political experience tend to be electorally more successful, and, once in parliament, they are more likely to behave independently and break party unity. Local birthplace has no effect on either personal vote or party unity. These findings have clear policy implications for the electoral and legislative strategies of political parties.
Seat allocation formulas affect candidates' incentives to campaign on a personal rather than party reputation. Variables that enhance personal vote-seeking include: (1) lack of party leadership control over access to and rank on ballots, (2) degree to which candidates are elected on individual votes independent of co-partisans, and (3) whether voters cast a single intra-party vote instead of multiple votes or a party-level vote. District magnitude has the unusual feature that, as it increases, the value of a personal reputation rises if the electoral formula itself fosters personal vote-seeking, but falls if the electoral formula fosters party reputation-seeking.
Generally the assumption is that legislators act to maximise their chances of re-election, with their optimal behaviour determined by the party-centred or candidate-centred nature of the electoral system in use. Existing evidence of the impact of members' actual behaviour on subsequent electoral performance is inconclusive. This research explores whether or not legislators who choose to focus on cultivating personal votes reap rewards from the electorate under the Single Transferable Vote (STV) electoral system. Exploring electoral reward under STV is particularly significant because some legislators face intra-party competition for votes while others do not – a key determining incentive for cultivating personal votes. This study uses a survey of Irish legislators in 2002 and 2007 to measure constituency orientation and effort. The data suggest an electoral reward for personal vote cultivation, although the relationship between intra-system incentive and reward is apparently not always as expected.
Electoral institutions should systematically affect the propensity of a country to rely and spend on distributive measures. Supporting evidence is however still rare because of the difficulty in finding comparable cross-national data, the employment of dummy variables to account for the electoral systems, and the failure to recognise the interacting effects of different electoral rules on policy outcomes. Employing national data on state aid expenditure and a number of measures across European Union countries, the article provides evidence that legislators elected in higher magnitude districts spend less. More interestingly, it shows the interlocking policy effects of electoral institutions. Where high district magnitude is combined with ballot control, party-based voting and pooling, these rules conjunctly dampen politicians’ incentives to cultivate a personal vote and lead to lower spending on, and use of, distributive measures. Where high district magnitude is not combined with these rules, results are inconclusive. With one exception though, if leaders do not have control over the ballot rank, higher magnitude increases reliance on distributive measures. Results are robust to several alternative political-economy explanations of fiscal policy outcomes.
This paper derives various hypotheses about parliamentary opposition in Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands from consociational theory, with the common denominator that there was cooperation rather than competition among the main political parties. Although to varying degrees, and with significant exceptions, this expectation was largely confirmed. Since the 1960s, though, each of these countries has experienced some degree of de-pillarisation, which had the hypothesised effect of increased competition in the electoral and parliamentary arenas. However, at the same time the main parties lost some of their ideological distinctiveness, leading to a major change in the basic opposition patterns that could be characterised, with some exaggeration, as having evolved ‘from opposition without competition to competition without opposition’. In the 1960s Arend Lijphart predicted that this would lead to anti-system opposition from the radical Left. Contrary to that expectation, the three countries witnessed challenges from the populist Right, with important differences between Belgium on the one hand, and Austria and the Netherlands on the other, as to the reaction by the main parties to this new opposition.
It is an enduring belief in American politics that legislators who “bring home the bacon” are rewarded for their efforts at the ballot box. Most researchers, however, have been unsuccessful in corroborating empirically a relationship between allocations to member districts and reelection margins. Previous research may have failed to detect a relationship due to misconceptualization, misspecified empirical tests, or both. We argue that not all legislators have the same incentives to utilize pork-barrel strategies to enhance their electoral margins. Furthermore the extent to which voters are influenced by the provision of distributive benefits is likely to depend on the attentiveness of voters to politics, their interest group affiliations, and their sources of political information. In short, both the predisposition to engage in pork-barrel strategies and their effects are likely to be conditional. Hypotheses derived from this respecification of the electoral connection thesis are tested with a data base that combines information on domestic assistance awards to congressional districts, information about members of Congress, and the political knowledge and group affiliations of individual voters. We find that only some incumbents, namely those who are most vulnerable, are likely to seek increases in new awards. Certain constituents, those who are politically attentive members or interest groups are most likely to be aware of new awards to the district and to more favorably evaluate the incumbent as a result. Most members of general public remain indifferent to alterations in the flow of new awards.
The electoral law in many European countries permits voters to indicate preferred candidates within a party list rather than to make a choice only between parties. This paper examines briefly the various voting arrangements which allow this and considers in some detail the patterns of their utilization and their possible consequences. Whilst such behaviour can be understood as a form of political participation, it is evident that patterns vary and consequences are uncertain due to the complex interrelationship between the different elements in the electoral situation.
This article develops and tests a number of competing expectations (institutional, party and individual) about what influenced the campaign activity of individual parliamentary candidates for the 2004 European Parliament elections. The principal interest is in the effects of variations in the design of electoral institutions across the Member States of the European Union. Based on the analysis, it is argued that an important distinction needs to be made between campaign effort and campaign goals, with electoral institutional factors having a more significant role over the latter.
Through the use of an original data set of bill initiation activity in six presidential democracies, we advance scholarly understanding of how the institutional incentives faced by legislative candi-dates influence representation. We extend and adapt theory, derived primarily from the experience of the U.S. Congress, demonstrating its viability, once assumed constants from the U.S. case are explicitly modeled, in quite distinct institutional contexts. In particular, we find the focus of individual legislators on national versus parochial concerns responds to the incentives provided by the candidate selection process, general election rules, legislator career patterns, and interbranch relations.
Proportional representation systems affect the extent to which elected legislators exhibit various attributes that allow them to earn a personal vote. The sources of variation in personal vote-earning attributes (PVEA) lie in informational shortcuts voters use under different electoral rules. List type (closed or open) and district magnitude (the number of legislators elected from a district) affect the types of shortcuts voters employ. When lists are closed, legislators' PVEA are of decreasing usefulness to voters as magnitude (and hence the number of candidates on a list) increases. When lists are open, legislators' PVEA are increasingly useful to voters as magnitude increases, because the number of candidates from which voters must choose whom to give a preference vote increases. As predicted by the theory, the probability that a legislator will exhibit PVEA—operationalized as local birthplace or lower-level electoral experience—declines with magnitude when lists are closed, but rises with magnitude when lists are open.
The debate on personalization in electoral politics is inconclusive. There is confusion about the concept of personalization. Moreover, the fact that party evaluation and person evaluation are interrelated complicates the debate. This paper focuses on the latter problem by employing counterfactual thought experiments in which voters are asked to simulate their vote with their candidate lower on the party list or nominated by another party. The results show that most voters put party above person and less than ten percent put person above party. A sizeable third category has a preference for an individual candidate as long as that candidate does not leave the party. Also, personalization is slightly more important with regard to (the leaders of) populist parties, and individual candidates are more important for voters with less education, less political knowledge and a less deeply rooted party preference.
Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models, first published in 2007, is a comprehensive manual for the applied researcher who wants to perform data analysis using linear and nonlinear regression and multilevel models. The book introduces a wide variety of models, whilst at the same time instructing the reader in how to fit these models using available software packages. The book illustrates the concepts by working through scores of real data examples that have arisen from the authors' own applied research, with programming codes provided for each one. Topics covered include causal inference, including regression, poststratification, matching, regression discontinuity, and instrumental variables, as well as multilevel logistic regression and missing-data imputation. Practical tips regarding building, fitting, and understanding are provided throughout.
The Gibbs sampler, the algorithm of Metropolis and similar iterative simulation methods are potentially very helpful for summarizing multivariate distributions. Used naively, however, iterative simulation can give misleading answers. Our methods are simple and generally applicable to the output of any iterative simulation; they are designed for researchers primarily interested in the science underlying the data and models they are analyzing, rather than for researchers interested in the probability theory underlying the iterative simulations themselves. Our recommended strategy is to use several independent sequences, with starting points sampled from an overdispersed distribution. At each step of the iterative simulation, we obtain, for each univariate estimand of interest, a distributional estimate and an estimate of how much sharper the distributional estimate might become if the simulations were continued indefinitely. Because our focus is on applied inference for Bayesian posterior distributions in real problems, which often tend toward normality after transformations and marginalization, we derive our results as normal-theory approximations to exact Bayesian inference, conditional on the observed simulations. The methods are illustrated on a random-effects mixture model applied to experimental measurements of reaction times of normal and schizophrenic patients.
This paper examines the importance of electoral rules for legislators' behavior. The German electoral system includes a mechanism which assigns whether legislators are elected under the "first-past-the-post" (FPTP), or the proportional representation (PR) electoral rule. Using this institution, we identify the effect of electoral rules on legislators' behavior and disentangle whether so-called pork barrel politics are due to political climate in a country or due to the electoral rule employed. We find significant differences in committee membership, depending whether the legislator is elected though FPTP or PR. legislators elected through FPTP system are members of committees that allows them to service their geographically based constituency. Legislators elected through PR are members of committees that service the party constituencies, which are not necessarily geographically based.
JAGS is a program for Bayesian Graphical modelling which aims for compatibility with Classic BUGS. The program could eventually be developed as an R package. This article explains the motivations for this program, briefly describes the architecture and then discusses some ideas for a vectorized form of the BUGS language.
The Politics of Belgium. Governing a Divided Society
- Kris Deschouwer