Simply a matter of context? Partisan contexts and party loyalties on free votes
| Author | Christopher D Raymond |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148117701752 |
| Published date | 01 May 2017 |
| Date | 01 May 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148117701752
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2017, Vol. 19(2) 353 –370
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148117701752
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Simply a matter of context?
Partisan contexts and party
loyalties on free votes
Christopher D Raymond
Abstract
While recent studies suggest the party loyalties of Members of Parliament (MPs) influence voting
behaviour on free votes independently of personal preferences, it remains to be seen to what
extent party loyalties influence MPs’ voting behaviour more generally. To this end, this article
examines the impact of the partisan context of the vote on the effects of party loyalties. Using
data from 20 divisions decided largely as free votes and controlling for personal preferences using
a survey measuring MPs’ attitudes, the analysis shows that the effect of party loyalty on voting
behaviour is strongest under the most partisan conditions: when the outcome is anticipated to be
close and most consequential to the success/failure of a bill. These findings suggest party loyalty
effects may emerge on other highly partisan divisions with partisan consequences and not appear
on less partisan divisions.
Keywords
free votes, parliamentary behaviour, party cohesion, party loyalty, party unity, preferences
Previous research examining the voting behaviour of British Members of Parliament
(MPs) shows that parties often remain cohesive on free votes, on which the whips are
removed (Cowley and Stuart, 1997, 2010; Hibbing and Marsh, 1987; Pattie et al., 1998;
Warhurst, 2008). Because MPs are free to choose how to vote on their own, previous
research suggests MPs’ personal preferences have significant effects on their voting
behaviour and that the high levels of cohesion observed on free votes are due to shared
preferences among MPs of the same party (Hibbing and Marsh, 1987; Marsh and Read,
1988; Mughan and Scully, 1997; Plumb, 2013, 2015). However, a growing body of
research suggests these high levels of cohesion are also due to MPs’ party identifications,
which are independent of shared preferences and the whip (Raymond, 2016; Raymond
and Overby, 2016; Raymond and Worth, 2016; Russell, 2014).
School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK
Corresponding author:
Christopher D Raymond, School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, Queen’s University
Belfast, 25 University Square, Belfast BT7 1NN, UK.
Email: c.d.raymond85@gmail.com
701752BPI0010.1177/1369148117701752The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsRaymond
research-article2017
Article
354 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 19(2)
Despite evidence that party identification impacts MPs’ voting behaviour on those
particular divisions studied in previous research, it remains to be seen whether these find-
ings can be generalised. Building on insights provided by specific examples in previous
studies of MPs’ voting behaviour (Cowley and Stuart, 1997, 2010; Overby et al., 1998),
this article examines the possibility that the effects of party identification vary according
to the partisan context of the vote. When the outcome of a particular division is uncertain
and/or more consequential for their parties, MPs will feel a sense of duty to help their
party win, and thus, party identification will exert considerable influence on MPs’ voting
behaviour; when the outcome is less consequential to the parties, the impact of party
identification will be weaker. To date, this argument has yet to be tested explicitly.
I test this argument by examining a series of divisions dealing with issues of embryol-
ogy and abortion regarding one particular piece of legislation: the Human Fertilisation
and Embryology Act 2008 (herein HFEA). While each stage of this bill has been exam-
ined extensively by previous research (Cowley and Stuart, 2010; Goodwin, 2015; Plumb
and Marsh, 2011), this particular piece of legislation provides an important opportunity to
formally test the argument above. For one, because most of these divisions were decided
as free votes, this circumstance allowed for variation in the partisan context—as MPs
were free to break from the rest of their party if they did not support a particular motion—
that allows us to conduct a systematic empirical test of the argument. Additionally, exam-
ining this particular piece of legislation allows us to employ an important survey of
MPs—the British Representation Survey (BRS) 2005 (Lovenduski et al., 2005)—which
provides rare, precise measures of MPs’ attitudes that allow us to rule out alternative
hypotheses relating to the impact of personal preferences on MPs’ voting behaviour.
In the next section, I review the literature regarding the determinants of MPs’ voting
behaviour on free votes and the argument to be tested here in greater detail. This review is
followed by a discussion of the context of the free vote divisions examined in the analysis.
Following that, I outline the details of the research design before proceeding to the discus-
sion of the results. A final section concludes and offers suggestions for future research.
Previous research
Previous research identifies three main factors thought to influence legislative voting
behaviour (Van Vonno et al., 2014). One is the whip, which parties use to discipline their
members when they act in ways that go against the interests of the party. Beyond the pres-
sures of the whip, MPs may vote according to preferences, either their personal prefer-
ences (Baumann et al., 2013, 2015a, 2015b; Plumb and Marsh, 2011) or those of their
constituents (Baumann et al., 2013, 2015a, 2015b; Sieberer, 2015), to whom MPs must
appeal in order to ensure re-election (André et al., 2015). These preferences, in turn, may
put them at odds with their parties (potentially leading to rebellious behaviour that neces-
sitates the use of the whip) or in lock-step, which makes the whip redundant (Norton and
Wood, 1993; Van Vonno et al., 2014). Finally, MPs may vote with the rest of their party’s
MPs—even if this means voting against constituents’ demands or their own preferences—
out of a lingering sense of loyalty to the party. This party loyalty is rooted in psychological
identifications with their parties—similar to the party identifications of voters (Butler and
Stokes, 1969; Campbell et al., 1960)—that are independent of preference- and discipline-
based effects (Raymond and Overby, 2016; Raymond and Worth, 2016; Russell, 2014).
Given the high levels of party cohesion observed on most divisions, it is difficult to
assess whether each of the explanations above influences MPs’ voting behaviour. To gain
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