Sponsoring Early Day Motions in the British House of Commons as a Response to Electoral Vulnerability

Kellermann, Michael

doi:10.1017/psrm.2013.19

Cited by 41 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Bowler (2010) finds evidence that members from electorally competitive constituencies are more likely to introduce private member bills than members from safe constituencies, and that the introduction of a private member bill is associated with improved electoral performance in the subsequent election. Kellermann (2013) finds similar results for the sponsorship of early day motions, and shows that the responsiveness of early day motion sponsorship to electoral vulnerability has increased over the past 20 years.…”

Section: Electoral Vulnerability and Legislative Effortsupporting

confidence: 57%

“…This analysis uses the vote margin in the prior election, calculated as the percentage of the vote won by the MP minus the percentage of the vote won by the closest competitor. This measure of electoral vulnerability is standard in the literature on electoral incentives for legislative behaviour in the UK (Bowler 2010;Kellermann 2013;Killermann and Proksch 2013), and has attractive properties as a general measure of electoral vulnerability (Blais and Lago 2009).…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Electoral Vulnerability, Constituency Focus, and Parliamentary Questions in the House of Commons

Kellermann¹

2015

The British Journal of Politics and International Relations

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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.

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Section: Electoral Vulnerability and Legislative Effortsupporting

confidence: 57%

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Electoral Vulnerability, Constituency Focus, and Parliamentary Questions in the House of Commons

Kellermann¹

2015

The British Journal of Politics and International Relations

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“…Electorally vulnerable legislators need to improve their reputation and convince voters to support them (Kellermann, 2013). Fourth, the electoral strength of legislators may affect their parliamentary behavior.…”

Section: Independent Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, 2 There exist two types of legislation in parliament: government bills and private members' bills. However, individual legislators have a high degree of discretion about their choice to be involved in parliamentary activities even under the presence of strong party discipline (see Kellermann, 2013). In contrast, private members' bills are introduced by individual legislators, independent of the government's program.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personal Attributes of Legislators and Parliamentary Behavior: An Analysis of Parliamentary Activities among Japanese Legislators

Ono¹

2015

Japanese Journal of Political Science

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This study explores the individual-level activities of legislators in parliament, which have been largely ignored in the literature on parliamentary democracies. Individual legislators are extensively involved in parliamentary activities such as drafting private members' bills and posing questions, even though these activities have only been considered to play marginal roles in parliamentary democracies. Moreover, their engagement varies significantly. By using unique data from Japan, this study demonstrates that the personal attributes of legislators affect their choice of parliamentary activities. Under electoral systems with intra-party competition, legislators use parliamentary activities as an important means to inform their constituents about what they can do for them and how they differ from other legislators. In elections, candidates cultivate personal votes by exploiting the image drawn from their personal attributes and, once elected, they behave in accordance with their attributes in order to maintain their electoral ground. Thus, they devote themselves to different activities in parliament. The data analyzed here support this argument. The results of empirical analyses show that legislators with local-level political experience engage in particularistic pork-barrel activities that will benefit their local interests, while legislators with legal-work experience allocate their time and energy to general policy-making activities that will enhance their public image and visibility as legal experts.

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“…What are the appropriate measures of participatory shirking and the effort levels of legislators? Following some recent studies of legislative speeches (Harris ; Kellerman ; Martin and Vanberg ; Morris ; Proksch and Slapin ; Rocca ), this article includes measures of legislative behavior beyond participation in roll‐call voting. First, we count how often legislators show up even when there is no roll‐call voting .…”

Section: Election Proximity and Participatory Shirkingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Effects of Election Proximity on Participatory Shirking: The Staggered‐Term Chamber as a Laboratory

Fukumoto

Matsuo

2015

Legislative Studies Qtrly

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This study discusses a downside of electoral pressure. As elections approach, legislators reduce their effort in legislative activities, albeit while increasing their efficiency. To show this, we propose a new, natural experimental design exploiting staggered legislative election calendars to identify the effect of approaching elections. Two‐way natural blocking improves the balance of pretreatments and an instrumental variable approach addresses noncompliance by retirees. Our analysis of the Japanese House of Councillors demonstrates that legislators up for election show up in the chamber less often than those not facing election; however, when they do show up and speak, they tend to speak longer.

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Sponsoring Early Day Motions in the British House of Commons as a Response to Electoral Vulnerability

Cited by 41 publications

References 27 publications

Electoral Vulnerability, Constituency Focus, and Parliamentary Questions in the House of Commons

Electoral Vulnerability, Constituency Focus, and Parliamentary Questions in the House of Commons

Personal Attributes of Legislators and Parliamentary Behavior: An Analysis of Parliamentary Activities among Japanese Legislators

The Effects of Election Proximity on Participatory Shirking: The Staggered‐Term Chamber as a Laboratory

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