Parties are the glue of modern democracy, binding voters to policy platforms and politicians. However, they are also often unpopular and untrusted among voters. Even in party-centred systems, individual Members of Parliament sometimes see dissent from their own party as a way to increase their support within the electorate. Increasing evidence suggests that voters do indeed express support for these rebellious politicians in multiple contexts. But why? Dissent could impede the parties that these voters support from attaining their goals and perhaps even undermine representative democracy. Drawing on theories of political representation, we examine the causes behind voter support for rebels using survey experiments conducted in four countries — Germany, France, Italy and the UK. In contrast to previous studies, we examine whether voters like rebels because rebels (a) take a policy position that is in line with voters’ own policy preferences, (b) voters think that rebellion is in line with the public’s preferences or (c) because voters attribute more positive character traits to rebels than to non-rebels. We additionally allow respondents to rate individual MPs rather than asking them to choose between two sitting MPs, something they would rarely do in an electoral contest. While we find support for the notion that voters like rebels and that they attribute more positive character traits to rebels, our evidence is weaker than in much of the existing research, and highly contingent on policy congruence.