This article: • Demonstrates that use of written parliamentary questions by British MPs is influenced by electoral context. • Shows that as the margin of victory in prior election decreases, members ask more questions. • Indicates that the margin of victory does not affect proportion of questions that focus on constituency issues. • Concludes that electorally vulnerable members use questions to signal effort, rather than attention to constituency issues. An emerging literature suggests that British MPs use legislative tools such as private member bills and early day motions to develop reputations with constituents, notwithstanding the common belief that individual legislative behaviour has little effect on electoral outcomes in Britain. This study demonstrates that British MPs also use parliamentary questions to respond to electoral vulnerability. Using data on written parliamentary questions asked between 1997 and 2010, it examines two possible consequences of electoral vulnerability: increased question frequency and greater focus on constituency issues in questions. It demonstrates that members ask more written parliamentary questions on average when their margin of victory decreases. In contrast, there is no meaningful evidence that MP focus on constituency issues increases with electoral marginality. These findings suggest that members use questions to signal effort to their constituents rather than attention to constituency issues.

While the importance of individual candidates in British elections has long been minimized, this article argues that early day motions (EDMs)—formal, non-binding expressions of opinion—allow backbench MPs to cultivate reputations with constituents. First, this article demonstrates that greater sponsorship of EDMs is associated with better electoral outcomes, which suggests that EDMs could help vulnerable MPs improve their electoral prospects. Secondly, a Bayesian hierarchical negative binomial hurdle model, which accounts for specific features of EDM sponsorship and is novel in political science, shows that members from electorally competitive constituencies are more likely to introduce EDMs, and introduce them more often, than members from less competitive constituencies. Moreover, this relationship has increased over the past 20 years.

This article develops a new method for estimating the ideological preferences of members of the British House of Commons. Existing methods produce implausible results due to high levels of party cohesion and strategic voting on the part of opposition parties. To circumvent these problems, this article estimates MP preferences using Early Day Motions (EDMs) as an alternative to roll-call votes. The Bayesian ideal point model for the decision to sign an EDM takes into account both policy preferences and signing costs. The estimates obtained have greater face validity than previous attempts to measure preferences in the House of Commons, recovering the expected order of parties and of members within parties. The estimates successfully predict voting behavior in the House of Commons. As with other Bayesian ideal point methods, this approach produces natural uncertainty estimates and allows for easy calculation of quantities of interest such as member ranks.

This paper estimates the effects of initial committee seniority on the career histories of Democratic members of the House of Representatives from 1949 to 2006. When more than one freshman representative is assigned to a committee, positions in the seniority queue are established by lottery. Randomization ensures that queue positions are uncorrelated in expectation with other legislator characteristics within these groups. This natural experiment allows us to estimate the causal effect of seniority on a variety of career outcomes. Lower ranked committee members are less likely to serve as subcommittee chairs on their initial committee, are more likely to transfer to other committees, and have fewer sponsored bills passed in the jurisdiction of their initial committee. On the other hand, there is little evidence that the seniority randomization has a net effect on reelection outcomes or non-committee bills passed.