Legislator Dissent Does Not Affect Electoral Outcomes

Abstract

Are there electoral consequences or benefits for legislators who deviate from the party line? We answer this question with data from individual-level vote choice and constituency-level electoral results in the UK for the last two decades. Exploring the variations in voting patterns over time with a panel-regression approach, we find results that are most compatible with the null hypothesis, that is, that dissent by legislators is neither rewarded nor punished in elections. These results call into question the degree to which voters know and/or care about legislative dissent in parliament.

Direct Replication and Additional Sensitivity and Robustness Analyses for Frederiksen (2022): A Replication Report from the Nottingham Replication Games

“…Qualitatively, however, there is very little substantive difference between the AMCE and pAMCE of variables. 10 Comparing Figure 7 to Figure D6 yields the same qualitative conclusions (e.g. the effect of distance is negative and increasing in distance).…”

“…However, we estimate the population average marginal conditional effect (pAMCE) proposed in de la Cuesta, Egami, and Imai (2022) using the theoretical -rather than empirical -target distributions Specifically, Figure 7 9 Though, one could easily adapt the definitions of AMCE and pAMCE to allow for more general distributions by replacing probability function, P r[t ijk,−l , t i,−j,k ] to a density function and replacing the summation over profiles to an integral. 10 It is not terribly surprising that controlling for background factors randomized independently of each other does not change the findings. We thank the author for pointing this out.…”