Reelection Can Increase Legislative Cohesion

• In Event: Dominant Parties and Voters

Abstract

It is often argued that when legislators have personal vote-seeking incentives, parties are less cohesive because legislators need to build bonds of accountability with their voters. I offer a theory for why this won’t always be the case. When parties control access to the resources candidates need to cultivate personal votes, they can condition a legislator’s access to these resources on loyalty to the party’s agenda. I test this theory by conducting a difference-in-differences analysis that leverages the staggered implementation of the 2014 Mexican Electoral Reform. This reform introduced the possibility of consecutive reelection for state legislators, increasing their incentives to cultivate personal votes. I estimate the ideological placement of Mexican state legislators applying correspondence analysis to a new dataset of over half a million legislative speeches in 20 states (2012-2018). Results show that reelection incentives increased intra-party cohesion, which has broad implications for countries introducing personal vote-oriented electoral reforms.

Author

• Lucia Motolinia, Washington University in St Louis