Partisan Dealignment and Personal Vote-Seeking in Parliamentary Behaviour
| Author | Thomas G Fleming |
| Published date | 01 February 2022 |
| Date | 01 February 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720953506 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720953506
Political Studies
2022, Vol. 70(1) 195 –215
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321720953506
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Partisan Dealignment and
Personal Vote-Seeking in
Parliamentary Behaviour
Thomas G Fleming
Abstract
What shapes legislators’ incentives for personal vote-seeking in parliament? Recent work suggests
that partisanship among voters deters personal vote-seeking, by limiting its effectiveness. This has
potentially significant implications for policy-making, election results and patterns of accountability.
However, empirical tests of this argument remain few in number and have several limitations. This
article thus offers a new test of the relationship between partisanship and personal vote-seeking.
Using legislators’ bill proposals as an indicator of their personal vote-seeking activity, I analyse
legislative behaviour in the UK House of Commons between 1964 and 2017. I find that members of
parliament make more legislative proposals when voters are less partisan. Moreover, partisanship
appears to moderate the influence of other drivers of personal vote-seeking: electorally vulnerable
legislators make more legislative proposals, but only at low levels of partisanship. These findings
provide new evidence that voters’ relationships with political parties affect legislators’ electoral
strategies and parliamentary behaviour.
Keywords
partisan dealignment, personal vote-seeking, parliamentary behaviour, bill proposals, UK House
of Commons
Accepted: 4 August 2020
A large body of scholarship suggests that legislators use parliamentary behaviour to cul-
tivate a personal vote. By treating parliament as an arena for signalling their individual
qualities, positions and achievements, they can generate personal electoral support,
beyond the votes attracted by their party label (Mayhew, 1974). This personal vote-seek-
ing has a number of important consequences. It can produce more particularistic policy-
making (Ames, 1995; Golden, 2003), and can dilute the coherence and popularity of
parties’ brands (Cox and McCubbins, 2005; Greene and Haber, 2015). Moreover, it might
undermine the role of elections as tools for ensuring the accountability of parties, by
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Corresponding author:
Thomas G Fleming, Nuffield College, University of Oxford, New Road, Oxford, OX1 1NF, UK.
Email: thomas.fleming@politics.ox.ac.uk
953506PSX0010.1177/0032321720953506Political StudiesFleming
research-article2020
Article
196 Political Studies 70(1)
directing voters’ attention to individual candidates. However, the extent of personal vote-
seeking behaviour varies widely, both within and across parliaments.
Existing explanations of variation in personal vote-seeking give strikingly little con-
sideration to its intended audience: voters. Instead, they focus predominantly on electoral
institutions (Carey and Shugart, 1995) or features of individual legislators such as elec-
toral vulnerability (Kellermann, 2016), gender (Lazarus and Steigerwalt, 2018) or local
constituency ties (Tavits, 2009). This oversight is surprising. It seems intuitive that legis-
lators’ electoral strategies should respond to the characteristics of those whose support
they want to attract. In particular, the relative effectiveness of party-based and candidate-
based electoral appeals should depend on voters’ partisanship. This article therefore
explores the relationship between partisanship among voters and personal vote-seeking
by their representatives.
Some recent scholarship has argued that members of parliament (MPs) engage in more
personal vote-seeking when voters are less partisan. In particular, Kam (2009) suggests
that voters with weaker partisan loyalties are more responsive to the merits of individual
MPs. Weaker partisanship among voters therefore increases the effectiveness of personal
vote-seeking, making it a more attractive strategy for MPs. In line with this argument,
recent studies indicate that legislators facing less partisan electorates vote more rebel-
liously (André et al., 2015a; Kam, 2009), ask more constituency-focused questions (Zittel
et al., 2019) and engage in less corruption (Eggers, 2014). Faced with less partisan voters,
legislators appear more concerned about their individual reputation. Given the well-doc-
umented decline of partisanship across advanced democracies (Dalton, 2000), this has
significant implications for the ongoing viability of political parties inside parliaments.
However, existing attempts to empirically link partisanship and personal vote-seek-
ing have several limitations. First, they focus predominantly on one type of legislative
behaviour: rebellious voting (André et al., 2015a; Kam, 2009). This focus has a number
of advantages – voting dissent can be a very high-profile form of personal vote-seeking,
with direct consequences for policy outcomes and government survival. However, dis-
sent is relatively rare, and many other kinds of behaviour can be tools for personal
vote-seeking, including bill proposals (Bowler, 2010), questions (Kellermann, 2016),
speeches (Proksch and Slapin, 2015) and committee work (Martin, 2011). Given this,
existing work may have captured only a small portion of partisanship’s consequences
for legislative behaviour.
Second, existing work has not explored how partisanship interacts with other drivers
of personal vote-seeking. If high partisanship limits the effectiveness of personal vote-
seeking, it should limit MPs’ desire to engage in it, regardless of their other incentives for
doing so. Conversely, the influence of other factors should be stronger when lower parti-
sanship makes personal vote-seeking a more viable strategy. Existing work has not
explored this possibility, despite recent studies suggesting that different drivers of per-
sonal vote-seeking interact with each other (André et al., 2015b; Shomer, 2017; Sieberer
and Ohmura, 2019). Partisanship’s consequences for personal vote-seeking may thus be
more complicated than previously argued.
Third, very little existing work has actually tested partisanship’s consequences for
the legislative behaviour of individual MPs. Previous studies have instead analysed
party-level cohesion (Kam, 2009), survey responses (André et al., 2015a) and non-
legislative behaviour (corruption) (Eggers, 2014). Only one study has empirically
linked voters’ partisanship to the parliamentary behaviour of individual MPs – Zittel
et al. (2019) show that German MPs facing less partisan electorates ask more
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