15:30 - 17:45
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Thomas Fleming
Discussant/s:
Alessandro Nai
Meeting Room F

Thomas Fleming
How Does Constituency-Level Partisan Dealignment Affect Parliamentary Behaviour?

Paul Bose
Political (self-)selection and competition: Evidence from U.S. Congressional elections

Corinna Kroeber, Jan Berz
Walking the line: Electoral cycles and the shift in legislative priorities among German Parliamentarians

Monika Mühlböck, Manuel Schwaninger
Risk Preferences and Outcome Bias in the Delegation Process

Lucia Motolinia
Cultivating a Personal Vote can Increase Legislative Cohesion: Evidence from Clientelistic Parties in Mexico
How Does Constituency-Level Partisan Dealignment Affect Parliamentary Behaviour?
Thomas Fleming
Department of Politics, University of York

Recent work has suggested that when voters are less partisan, legislators engage in more personal vote-seeking. This has potentially important implications, given the widespread decline of partisanship in many countries, and the well-noted consequences of personal vote-seeking for policy-making, election results, and accountability. However, existing tests of this argument use either aggregate-level measures of partisanship, or constituency-level proxy measures. We thus lack direct evidence linking constituency-level partisan dealignment to MPs’ parliamentary behaviour. To address this lacuna, this paper uses multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) to produce new estimates of constituency-level partisan dealignment in the UK between 2010 and 2017. I then test the relationship between these estimates and – as an indicator of personal vote-seeking – MPs’ constituency focus in parliamentary speeches. I find that when MPs represent a less partisan constituency, they talk more about that constituency in parliament. This offers new evidence that local voters’ attitudes to political parties shape the way their elected representatives behave.