The question whether politicians’ outside earnings affect their legislative behaviour is part of a lively debate about the quality of representative democracy. However, moonlighting effects on vote defections by members of parliament (MPs) have remained underexposed yet. Based on Competing Principals Theory, it is argued that, owing to a higher degree of career-related independence, MPs with high outside earnings can be less effectively disciplined by their party and, therefore, show higher probabilities to vote against the party line. This proposition is tested quantitatively using logistic panel regressions against a new dataset of more than 115,000 individual votes in the German Bundestag (2013–2017). Empirically, the results corroborate the theoretical expectations and are robust against different specifications. The findings have important implications for our understanding of the link between politicians’ career paths and their political behaviour.
In the literature on the determinants of party unity, one pathway has remained largely neglected: division of labour. Given their workload, members of parliament (MPs) are only thoroughly concerned with a subset of policies. We argue that this results in MPs casting fewer dissenting votes on matters within their area of specialization since they have had the opportunity to shape the party line there. Regression analyses using data for the German Bundestag support this hypothesis, including four important refinements: Not only the current but also past membership in the responsible committee reduces an MP’s defection probability. Additionally, this pattern is more pronounced for policy spokespersons and for less consequential, i.e., non-legislative votes as well as for issues less salient to the MP’s party. The results have implications for our understanding of MPs’ legislative behaviour, the functioning of parliaments as institutions and for the relationship between parties, MPs and voters.
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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