Partisanship and the Effectiveness of Personal Vote Seeking

Abstract

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.