Voters seem to prefer having independent-minded legislative representatives in parliament. Indeed, an increasing number of studies report that people express significantly higher levels of support for legislators who vote against their party line. If this preference is reflected in voters' electoral behaviour, it could have important implications for modern democracies, where political parties need discipline to play their central role in delegation and accountability.

This paper will provide a test for the hyphothesis that voters reward legislative dissent in elections. Specifically, we will test the effect of legislator dissent in the House of Commons on the UK general elections, on both aggregate- and individual-level outcomes. The former will draw on a dataset that covers the period between 1997 and 2019, bringing together observations from (a) MPs’ votes in six parliamentary terms and (b) electoral results in their constituency before and after these terms. We will complement this dataset with panel survey data on (c) their constituents’ electoral behaviour, which limits the beginning of the period to 2005 for individual-level analysis.

Simple comparisons of electoral outcomes between those who do and do not dissent from their party line are likely to be misleading. There might be systematic differences between these two groups of people, and these differences might affect both legislative dissent and electoral outcomes. We will address these concerns with fixed-effect regression models, limiting the analysis to within-MP and, for individual-level analysis, within-respondent comparisons. This will provide us with a clear identification strategy, with credible claims of causes and effects.