Loyal lists, distinctive districts: how dissent-shirking and leisure-shirking affect mixed-candidate selection

Abstract

In parliamentary systems, party leaderships accomplish party unity by promising positive incentives to their members of parliament (MP) and threatening them with negative incentives. Regarding reselection, ‘loyal’ and active MPs should be rewarded with promising list positions, while rebellious and ‘slacking’ MPs should be punished with worse list positions or even denied renomination. Although this assumption is central to explaining party unity induced by party discipline, empirical evidence for this practice has been scarce. The study combines data on roll-call voting, parliamentary speeches and questions in the German Bundestag from 1990 to 2017 with novel data on renominations including renomination failures. Investigating list position changes and renomination failures in the German mixed-member system, the results indicate that selectorates of list candidates punished dissenting voting behaviour, while selectorates of district candidates considered the degree of parliamentary activity. The findings have broader implications for the representatives’ accountability in parliamentary systems.

Keywords:

• Candidate selection
• legislative behaviour
• dissent-shirking
• leisure-shirking
• German Bundestag

Acknowledgements

We thank the participants of the ECPR General Conference 2020 panel ‘The Politics of Procedural Choice in Legislatures’, of the ECPR General Conference 2021 panel ‘Candidates and Careers of MPs’ and of the Comparative Politics Colloquium at the University of Bamberg, and especially Ulrich Sieberer, Elena Frech, Radoslaw Zubek, Tom Louwerse as well as the West European Politics reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. We moreover thank Lennart Vogt and Natalia Mleczko for excellent research assistance. All errors remain are own.

Data availability statement

Data and code to replicate the results in this article will be made publicly available at the Harvard Dataverse.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 There is a certain tension between the theoretical derivation and the empirical reality. In game theoretic terms, candidate selection is a power transferred to the central authority ‘party leadership’ to overcome the collective action problems of party unity and party vitality. In the democratic delegation chain, candidate selection serves as an ex-post control mechanism available to the principal ‘party leadership’ to ensure loyal agents (MPs) (Müller 2000). In empirical reality, however, the actor in candidate selection is the party selectorate, which may share certain goals with the party leadership, but is not necessarily personally identical with the party leadership. Depending on the organizational and preferential overlap between party leadership and the party selectorate, we can expect the party selectorate to act more or less according to the incentive logic for providing public goods. We thank an anonymous referee for pointing us to this clarification.

2 We thank an anonymous referee for pointing out the potentially independent effect of electoral institutions on the selectorates’ preferences in candidate selection.

3 Conceptually, we do not understand this measure as proxy for the general preferential distance between the MP and her party, but as measure of how often an MP has expressed dissent with the party line at the most visible stage possible: recorded votes in parliament (Proksch and Slapin 2015: 26). Consequently, the critique of selection bias because of the restriction to recorded votes (Carrubba et al. 2006; Hix et al. 2018; Hug 2010) does not apply to our study. We do not expect dissenting behaviour in non-recorded votes to affect party leaderships’ reselection considerations, because this kind of dissenting behaviour is very unlikely to be noticed by the public and thus not harmful for the party label.

4 We abstain from calculating an overall index of parliamentary activity because this would assume to either consider every parliamentary activity as equally important for the selectorate or require a weighting of the different activities, which is hard to define, since the weight of each type of activity for the selectorate is unclear. Moreover, this weight might vary across the career stages of MPs (Bailer and Ohmura 2018).

5 In a plausibility check of our data, we noticed that cumulative numbers of parliamentary interpellations and questions from the Every Single Word dataset slightly differ from records published by the parliamentary documentation service of the German Bundestag in the electoral periods 16 to 18. We did not detect systematic deviations alongside PPGs and thus assume the missing occur randomly.

6 We thank an anonymous referee for this point.

7 Since this measure was standardized by PPG per electoral period, one standard deviation amounts to dissent with the party line in 0.7 percent up to 7.5 percent of all RCVs (mean value is 2.0 percent).

8 See note 7; one standard deviation amounts to 1.2 up to 3.6 speeches per year.

9 All results remain substantially robust when using panel logistic regression with random effects for MPs. The only difference is that in our FPTP-tier failure model, the coefficient of parliamentary interpellations becomes insignificant, while the coefficient of parliamentary questions becomes statistically significant (p < 0.1), which does not hurt our interpretation concerning the theoretical mechanisms.

10 Our findings suggest that success in reselection in the different tiers is partly contingent on different types of parliamentary behaviour, which both contribute to the collective party goals of party unity and party vitality. This may be a potential benefit for parties in mixed-member systems contrary to pure (s)electoral systems. We thank an anonymous referee for this point.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially funded by the Standing Committee for Research and Junior Researchers (FNK) at University of Bamberg (project numbers 06072109 and 06072108).

Notes on contributors

David Schmuck

David Schmuck is a researcher and PhD candidate at the Chair for Empirical Political Science, University of Bamberg. His research interests include parliamentary careers and portfolio design in coalition governments. [[email protected]]

Lukas Hohendorf

Lukas Hohendorf is a researcher and PhD candidate at the Chair for Empirical Political Science, University of Bamberg. His research interests include party strategies and individual position taking by legislators and candidates in multi-party systems. [[email protected]]