Legislator Dissent as a Valence Signal

Abstract

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. We discuss how our findings apply to other contexts in more detail in the conclusion. 16 We begin the article by outlining the mechanisms through which dissent may affect voter evaluations of their representative. We then present the results from our three studies, beginning with the observational data before moving on to the experimental studies. We conclude by considering the broader implications of our findings. Theory and expectationsDrawing on existing literature, we consider three mechanisms through which dissent may affect constituent evaluations of their legislative representative. Dissent could: (1) Profile effectsThe profile effects hypothesis, suggested as one possible mechanism by Kam, contends that dissenting legislators receive electoral benefits due to their enhanced media profile. 17 This increases their name recognition, which in turn leads to greater constituent approval and more support at the polls, for example via the recognition heuristic. 18 If any increased electoral success of dissenting legislators is wholly the result of such effects, then constituents do not in fact react to independentmindedness directly at all. 19 Conditional evaluationsIn contrast, conditional evaluation accounts posit that dissent can have a direct impact on voter evaluations of a legislator, but that the nature of this effect depends on the nature and context of the dissent and on the particular preferences of the voter. The predictions regarding voters who identify with a party other than that of their MP ('opposing partisans') are more ambiguous: these voters may be indifferent to dissent from their MP, or may even have particularly positive evaluations of dissent, inasmuch as it damages the brand of a party that competes with their own. Finally, non-partisans may also react particularly positively to dissent, if many such voters have a general dislike for partisan politics. 22Such partisan assessments of dissent need to be distinguished from a subtly different type of conditionality which also relates to voter partisanship, and which we label partisan crowding out.This refers to Kam's argument that when voters with strong partisan attachments come to evaluate an individual politician, party-related considerations (including the party affiliation of that politician) tend to dominate so that there is little or no room left for any other information about the politician -such as their dissent behaviour -to have any impact. 23 In contrast, the individual attributes of a politician ...

Ideology, Grandstanding, and Strategic Party Disloyalty in the British Parliament

“…The relationship is statistically significant (p = 0.016) and moving from the first decile of the constituency benefits variable to the ninth decile increases the likelihood of rebellion by approximately 11 percentage points, from approximately 14% to 25%. Of course, this correlation cannot provide evidence of a causal link between constituency characteristics and rebellion, but combined with evidence from survey experiments regarding the values that voters place on rebellion (Campbell et al 2016) it is plausible that Labour MPs in these constituencies view rebellion as a means to connect with voters.…”

Politicians as Party Hacks: Party Loyalty and Public Distrust in Politicians

“…However, research on voter behavior suggests that this style of representation might not match citizens' preferences. Experimental studies show that politicians who are described as independent from and willing to speak out against their party are often evaluated more favorably by voters (Carson et al 2010;Campbell et al 2016).…”

The Meaningful Votes: Voting on Brexit in the British House of Commons

“…Unlike in US politics, however, in the United Kingdom and elsewhere discipline-breakers tend to be politicians with ideologically extreme views (Kam 2009), and they belong mainly to the governing party (Kirkland and Slapin 2018). The available evidence suggests that voters pay some attention to how their representatives vote, at least when the issue is controversial, and that they reward them for rebelling (e.g., Longley 1998;Johnston et al 2002;Pattie et al 1994;Bertelli and Dolan 2009;Vivyan and Wagner 2012;Campbell et al 2019). The evidence also shows that career concerns play a role (e.g., Benedetto and Hix 2007;Eggers and Spirling 2018) although the evidence on whether parties actually punish individual politicians for voting against the party line is mixed (Eggers and Spirling 2016;Kauder et al 2017).…”

“…They find that parties do not punish politicians who have voted against the party line in that way. 9 Campbell et al (2019) and Vivyan and Wagner (2012) present evidence from the UK that deviating from the party line can help MPs seeking re-election. Pattie et al (1994) show that rebellion on high profile issues, such as capital punishment or the poll tax, had affected the re-election prospects of the rebels, but otherwise they find no discernible consequences.…”