The Cost of Ruling and Incumbent Party Legislator Dissent

• In Event: Strategic Choices in Changing Environments

Abstract

In almost every modern parliamentary democracy, legislators organize within political parties. This process is key to effective democratic governance: Through parties, legislators can coordinate and enforce discipline and, in turn, build and maintain majorities for legislation (Schattschneider 1942; Tavits 2009). Conversely, when party unity declines and legislators dissent from the line of their party, it has adverse consequences for democracies and citizens: Dissent makes it difficult for citizens to know what parties stand for and who to hold accountable for policies. Dissent can also lead to government inefficiency, or even shutdown, meaning that the political system cannot respond to social problems and deliver services to citizens (Mitchell 1999; Müller & Strøm 2000, 584–587; Carey 2009).
Given these consequences, scholars have taken a keen interest in explaining why legislator dissent from the party line occurs, pointing to politicians' characteristics and the culture and institutions around them as main explanations (Crowe 1983; Kam 2006; Sieberer 2006). In this study, we demonstrate that citizens themselves, paradoxically, play a role in inducing legislator dissent and the problems it entails. We build a theory proposing that the electoral cost of ruling that citizens impose on incumbent parties (Stevenson 2002; Wlezien 2017) incentivizes individual incumbent legislators to vote against the party line in order to distance themselves from the deteriorating party brand. Hence, after citizens decide that a legislator’s party should take office, they gradually withdraw their support for this party, making it increasingly unattractive for the legislator to vote in favor of the party’s policies. The electoral cost of ruling can thus translate into a legislative cost of ruling with broader implications for party governance.
We test and substantiate several observable implications of our theory using a unique dataset with the voting behavior of all MPs elected for the British parliament between 1992 and 2015 coupled with MP-level election results and monthly opinion poll data on party popularity. Estimating fixed effects and difference-in-difference models, we obtain high internal validity by controlling for a host of individual- and time-invariant factors while maintaining the high external validity of the data. Finally, we show that our findings are robust to a number of alternative model specifications.
Our study has three central implications. First, it highlights that legislators of incumbent parties face incentives to disrupt party discipline not only from the political system but also from citizens. This is paradoxical because cohesive, disciplined parties generally allow citizens to hold elites accountable for past decisions, help them predict what future decisions will be implemented, and ensure effective governance and delivery of state services (Schattschneider 1942; Carey 2007). Second, and related, this paradoxical pattern has democratic consequences. Our findings imply that the electoral cost of ruling constrains effective party governance with increased risks of gridlock on important issues and government shut-down. Third, the results provide key contributions to the cost of ruling literature and the literature on legislative behavior. To the cost of ruling literature, we add a downstream consequence of this phenomenon by considering its broader democratic, governance-related implications. Rather than establishing the phenomenon itself and its implications for election outcomes and government formation (the focus in existing research), we establish that this phenomenon has important implications for the incentives and behavior of legislators in the legislative process following the election. We contribute to the literature on legislative behavior by adding a new explanation for legislator party dissent. In contrast to existing work paying special attention to institutional variation, this explanation should be less country specific as it should apply to all contexts in which the cost of ruling occurs. This may help account for the general difficulties parties face in long-term governing across otherwise institutionally diverse countries.

Authors

• Troels Bøggild

• Helene Helboe Pedersen, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University