The Legislative Effects of Campaign Personalization An Analysis on the Legislative Behavior of Successful German Constituency Candidates

Abstract

<jats:p> Personalized campaign styles are of increasing importance in contemporary election campaigns at all levels of politics. Surprisingly, we know little about their implications for the behavior of successful candidates once they take public office. This paper aims to fill this gap in empirical and theoretical ways. It shows that campaign personalization results in legislative personalization. Legislators that ran personalized campaigns are found to be more likely to deviate in roll call votes and to take independent positions on the floor. These findings result from a novel dataset that matches survey evidence on candidates’ campaign styles in the 2009 German Federal Elections with the legislative behavior of successful candidates in the 17th German Bundestag (2009–2013). Combining data from the campaign and legislative arenas allows us to explore the wider consequences of campaign personalization. </jats:p>

Strategies of the Party Selectorate: The Two-Level Game in District Selections in Germany’s Mixed Member Electoral System

“…Instead, as part of the vote-seeking strategy of the local parties' selectorates in competitive districts, it is very likely that the candidates and their vote-earning characteristics are getting increasingly more important during candidate selection. Further research might focus on the impact of the specific strategies of the selectorates and the outcome of candidate selection as and important explanatory factor for the campaign behavior of the candidates, their legislative behavior (Papp and Zorigt, 2016;Zittel and Nyhuis, 2021) and the impact on political parties.…”

“…This suggests that the selectorate nominates under certain conditions candidates for strategic considerations, e.g., electoral goals. By that, the strategies are likely to influence the hierarchy of the selection criteria, the outcome of the candidate selection process, the campaign behavior and the behavior of MPs (e.g., Preece, 2014;Papp and Zorigt, 2016;Ascencio and Kerevel, 2020;Zittel and Nyhuis, 2021).…”

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

“…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. Empirically, holding or ambitions to reach powerful offices (Kernecker, 2017;Bhattacharya and Papageorgiou, 2019;Zittel and Nyhuis, 2019) strengthen, whereas an MP's need for personal votes in the general election (Sieberer, 2010;Sieberer and Ohmura, 2021) or in intra-party primaries (Sozzi, 2023), personalized campaign styles (Zittel and Nyhuis, 2021), local ties (Tavits, 2009), economic interests of an MP's constituency (Stiller, 2023), outside earnings (Mai, 2022), a low prospect of being promoted to higher office (Benedetto and Hix, 2007), career ambitions at another political level (Meserve et al, 2009), party switching (Gherghina and Chiru, 2014), impending retirement (Mai et al, 2023, but Willumsen andGoetz, 2017 for non-results) or being a 'career politician' (Heuwieser, 2018) weakens an MP's propensity to toe the party line, arguably due to a changed effectiveness of party discipline compared to the baseline MP.…”

Advocates of climate action? The age of members of parliament and their activity in legislative debates on climate change

“…On the basis of the office seeking motivation, the legislative behavior of parties on the one hand and their individual representatives on the other is usually explained as being strategic, whereby differences in these strategies are largely assumed to be rooted in the institutional level of politics like the electoral system (e.g., Bol et al 2021 ; Ohmura et al 2018 ; Zittel and Nyhuis 2021 ). However, contextual features such as issues that dominate the public agenda also matter for decision-making processes of parties and individual politicians (e.g., Hobolt and De Vries 2015 ; Meyer and Wagner 2016 ; Rovny and Whitefield 2019 ).…”