Loyal Activists? Party Socialization and Dissenting Voting Behavior in Parliament

Abstract

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.

Division of labour and dissenting voting behaviour of MPs in a ‘working parliament’

“…Voting unity is not determined by preference similarity among the MPs alone (Willumsen, 2022), although MPs' own ideological stances demonstrably affect their voting behaviour in certain policy areas (e.g., Degner and Leuffen, 2016). The loyalty path to unity has been conceptualized as the result of MPs' party socialization (Rehmert, 2022;Mai and Wenzelburger, 2023). To capture the varying effectiveness of party discipline, the career-related dependence of MPs on their party, compared to other principals (e.g., voters), has been approximated.…”