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
Cultivating a Personal Vote can Increase Legislative Cohesion: Evidence from Clientelistic Parties in Mexico
Lucia Motolinia
New York University

Most research on legislative cohesion suggests that electoral systems that incentivize legislators to cultivate a personal vote generate less cohesive parties. Scholars expect reelection incentives to undercut legislative cohesion because deviating from the party helps legislators enhance their personal reputations. In contrast, this article posits that reelection incentives can increase legislative cohesion in places with clientelistic parties. It can do so, because party leaders are able to condition legislators' access to particularistic benefits on legislators' loyalty to the party's agenda. To test this hypothesis, I estimate the ideological placement of Mexican local legislators by applying correspondence analysis to a new dataset of over half a million individual speeches given by legislators to their respective local congresses in 20 Mexican states from 2012 to 2018. Conducting a difference-in-differences analysis that leverages the staggered implementation of the 2014 Mexican Electoral Reform, which lifted a constitutional ban on reelection established in 1933, I find that the introduction of reelection incentives increases legislative cohesion and that the effect is driven by SSD-elected legislators.