Political Parties and MPs’ Morality Policy Voting Behaviour: Evidence from Germany

Engler, Fabian; Dümig, Kathrin

doi:10.1093/pa/gsw034

Cited by 11 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…To give a methodological example, voting behavior in roll-call votes that are freed from the obligation to vote in accordance with party policy may reveal salient identities when looking at the shared characteristics (such as other organizational bonds, direct or list mandates as local identities, committee membership as a sectoral identity or demographic characteristics like gender, age, etc., to name but a few examples) (Engler and Dümig 2017). With regard to actors' behavior, this strategy enables us to identify shared identities and to assess which identity was decisive for a specific vote or preference due to the underlying coordinated action.…”

Section: Integrating Sipp: Past and Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social identities in the policy process

2018

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This paper introduces social identity theory and self-categorization theory to policy process research. Drawing from the prominent and widely acknowledged psychological social identity approach, it develops the theoretical concept of social identities in the policy process (SIPP) and advances the understanding of policy actors' behavior. Compared to psychological foundations of existing theories of the policy process, the social identity approach emphasizes the importance of social group membership for forming common views on policy content and shaping policy actors' behavior as beneficial to the in-group. Policy actors thus act in accordance with their salient social identity. This salience is dependent on the strength of a social identity, determined by the feeling of belonging, positive evaluation, and emotional bond to a group. Additionally, social identities are moderated by internal and external factors. SIPP distinguish three levels of analysis, ranging from the psychological microlevel concerned with individual behavior and preferences, over the socio-psychological mesolevel of intra-and intergroup dynamics toward a macroperspective of general types of social identities. In policy subsystems, five such types appear relevant: organizational identities, local identities, sectoral identities, demographic identities, and informal identities. By integrating SIPP into the analytical categories of theories of the policy process, this paper calls for a future research agenda establishing a further theoretical lens for a better understanding of policy processes.

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Section: Integrating Sipp: Past and Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social identities in the policy process

2018

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“…For unwhipped votes , existing studies mainly investigate the impact of personal and constituency preferences on the direction of MPs' voting decisions. Those preferences have either been measured directly using survey data (for personal preferences, see Raymond 2017a, 2017b; Raymond and Overby 2016; Raymond and Worth 2017; for constituency preferences, see Hanretty et al 2017) or approximated using sociodemographic characteristics of the MP (Arzheimer 2015; Baumann et al 2013, 2015; Bauer‐Blaschkowski and Mai 2019; Engler and Dümig 2017; Hibbing and Marsh 1987; Overby et al 1998; Plumb 2015; Preidel 2016; Wenzelburger and Fehrenz 2018) and/or the sociodemographic composition of an MP's constituency as proxies (Baumann et al 2013; Haider‐Markel 1999; Hibbing and Marsh 1987; Kauder and Potrafke 2019; Mai et al 2022; Overby et al 2011). In addition, the MPs' party affiliation has proved to be a significant predictor of voting in favor of permissive or restrictive morality policies, respectively (Engler and Dümig 2017; Cowley and Stuart 1997, 2010; Hibbing and Marsh 1987; Overby et al 1998; Plumb 2015; Raymond 2017a, 2017b; Raymond and Overby 2016; Raymond and Worth 2017).…”

Section: Party Loyalty and Legislative Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

Loyal Activists? Party Socialization and Dissenting Voting Behavior in Parliament

Mai

Wenzelburger

2023

Legislative Studies Qtrly

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The question of why members of parliament (MPs) overwhelmingly toe the party line is receiving increasing scholarly attention. Adding to discipline‐based approaches, party loyalty, that is, a feeling of allegiance not related to policy agreement or disciplinary pressures, is an important part of the explanation. In this article, we employ a more nuanced view on party loyalty than previous observational studies and conceptualize it as the result of socialization processes of most politicians into the structures of their party prior to their mandate. We test our argument quantitatively using data for whipped votes in the German Bundestag (1949–2017). The results support our propositions that MPs who didn't hold party offices prior to their mandate have a higher probability of vote defection and that the behavioral differences related to pre‐parliamentary socialization vanish the longer MPs serve in parliament. Our work has important implications for research on intraparty politics, legislative behavior, and representation.

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“…This figure is all the more impressive as the sample includes cases like the law on the transfer of government and parliament from Bonn to Berlin, in which geography mostly determined MPs’ voting behavior (Ohmura, 2014: 11) and where we would have difficulty in hypothesizing party positions to begin with. Similarly, Engler and Dümig (2017), analyzing eight free votes between 1990 and 2015 that dealt with issues of morality via a series of regression analyses, found that “party affiliation proves to be the most important predictor of voting behaviour, even if personal characteristics and constituents’ preferences are taken into account” (Engler and Dümig, 2017: 564). Other studies, looking at behavior in free votes for individual pieces of legislation and controlling, among other things, for preferences of the MPs’ constituencies, corroborate these results (Arzheimer, 2015; Bauer-Blaschkowski and Mai, 2019: 238–251; Baumann et al, 2013, 2015).…”

Section: Empirical Illustrations Of the Agency-based Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bringing agency back into the study of partisan politics: A note on recent developments in the literature on party politics

Wenzelburger

Zohlnhöfer

2020

Party Politics

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The question of whether political parties make a systematic difference in terms of public policies is one of the classics of comparative public policy research. However, unstable class cleavages and changing party strategies challenge the assumptions of traditional partisan theory, namely that parties represent a stable group of voters and implement policies according to the preferences of this group. Against this backdrop, several recent studies have called for an “electoral turn” in partisan theory and suggest establishing a party–voter link on the microlevel, depending on the policy area at stake. In this article, we propose a different view on partisan effects. While we do not argue that public opinion is unimportant for parties, we maintain that the electoral turn literature has a tendency to black-box the political actors and their preferences, because they become mere agents of voter preferences. Our argument builds on a growing literature that shows that political actors both at the party member and the elite level do have preferences and that these may or may not be coherent with those of the voters. Hence, the effect of partisan ideology on public policies may also be situated on the level of the parties or policy-makers themselves.

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Political Parties and MPs’ Morality Policy Voting Behaviour: Evidence from Germany

Cited by 11 publications

References 30 publications

Social identities in the policy process

Social identities in the policy process

Loyal Activists? Party Socialization and Dissenting Voting Behavior in Parliament

Bringing agency back into the study of partisan politics: A note on recent developments in the literature on party politics

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