A Unified Scale of Electoral Incentives

Re-electing MEPs: The factors determining re-election probabilities

“…These steps imply a set of design decisions for this study. First, I include the 63 MEPs who did not secure a place on their parties' list and set their re-election probabilities to zero (see footnote 9 in Stoffel, 2014: 60). Not placing a candidate on the party list can also be a candidate selection decision: maybe the most severe form of punishment by the party.…”

When Do Female MPs Represent Women’s Interests? Electoral Systems and the Legislative Behavior of Women

“…However, as outlined above, a simple dichotomous distinction between list and PR candidates is not sufficient in the German case due to the huge number of dual candidates and the resulting contamination effects between the two electoral tiers. 6 Following Stoffel (2014a, 2014b) and Bernauer and Munzert (2014), I thus use the re-election probability of MPs in both tiers to measure their actual electoral incentive structure. This variable replaces the simple dichotomous distinction between district and list candidates with a continuous measurement, accounts for possible contaminations of the electoral tiers and indicates whether MPs should rather adhere to the incentives of the SMD or PR electoral system.…”

“…Re-election probabilities are calculated in a three-step process as described in Stoffel (2014b) and Stoffel and Sieberer (2018). 7 First, in order to determine the re-election safety in the district ( p D i ) , a probit model is calculated that uses the winning/losing margin at the election at time t – 1 to calculate the probability that an MP wins the district seat at the election at time t .…”

“…In the second step, the electoral safety of an MP on her party list is predicted. Again, a probit model is calculated that uses the list position at time t to predict the probability that a MP wins a list mandate ( p L i ) (see Stoffel (2014b) and Stoffel and Sieberer (2018) for a detailed description). In the final step, the two individual probabilities are combined to obtain the total re-election probability for each member of the Bundestag.…”

“…However, most MPs simultaneously run as dual candidates in both electoral tiers and thus simultaneously face electoral incentives from the PR and the SMD tier. In order to take these “contamination effects” (Ferrara, Herron, and Nishikawa 2005) into consideration, I use the re-election safety of a legislator in the two different tiers to operationalize the overlapping electoral incentive structure of MPs (Stoffel 2014b; Stoffel and Sieberer 2018). Theoretically, it is expected that female legislators are more likely to represent women’s interests if their re-election does not depend on the representation of local interests of the constituencies in their electoral districts.…”