Partisan Dealignment and Personal Vote-Seeking in Parliamentary Behaviour

Thomas G Fleming

doi:10.1177/0032321720953506

Abstract

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.

Highlights

A large body of scholarship suggests that legislators use parliamentary behaviour to cultivate a personal vote
This article explores the relationship between partisanship among voters and personal vote-seeking by their representatives
Some recent scholarship has argued that members of parliament (MPs) engage in more personal vote-seeking when voters are less partisan

Summary

Introduction

A large body of scholarship suggests that legislators use parliamentary behaviour to cultivate a personal vote. I use MPs’ bill proposal activity as an indicator of their personal vote-seeking and measure partisanship as the proportion of the electorate identifying ‘very strongly’ with a political party. Most legislatures provide opportunities for individual MPs to propose legislation, and existing work suggests that doing so increases MPs’ personal vote.

Results

Conclusion