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Abstract
While party unity in legislative voting is generally high in parliamentary democracies, debates provide MPs with the opportunity to express political views even if they deviate from the party line. Using the extensive parliamentary debates on the reform of the Irish abortion legislation in 2001 and 2013, we assess whether Teachtaí Dála (TD) send signals to their constituents. In doing so, we take into account literature on the individual preference formation of political actors as well as institutional accounts that stress vote-seeking resulting from the electoral system. We also argue that personal characteristics like gender and family status should affect the positions of TDs on the abortion issue. In addition, we argue that the preferences of the constituents should particularly be taken into account by those TDs who only narrowly won a seat in the Dáil. Our analysis, which is based on a content analysis of all speeches held during the abortion reform debates in the Dáil in 2001 and 2013, provides support for our expectations.
Acknowledgements
A previous version of this article was presented at the ECPR General Conference, held 4-7 September 2013, in Bordeaux, France. We wish to thank the panel participants and the Irish Political Studies anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments on previous versions of this article. We are grateful for the support by Alexander Herzog and Slava Mikhaylov, who permitted us access to their database of parliamentary speeches in Ireland.
ORCID
Jochen Müller http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4021-7442
Notes
1 See, e.g. ‘Fine Gael expels four TDs for voting against abortion Bill’, The Irish Times, 3 July 2013 and ‘Mixed views on Creighton and Mathews’, The Irish Times, 13 July 2013.
2 ‘Fianna Fáil: doubts over Martin's leadership’, Sunday Independent, 4 August 2013.
3 This is only slightly less than the 58 TDs that spoke in the debate on the future of the Fianna Fáil–PDs coalition government in 1991, which was used by Laver & Benoit (Citation2002) to present their seminal ‘Wordscores’ approach (see also Laver et al., Citation2003).
4 The full text of speeches for the 2001 debate on abortion was made available by Alexander Herzog and Slava Mikhaylov (see Herzog & Mikhaylov, Citation2013a, Citation2013b).
5 The term ‘constituency’ refers here to geographical constituencies, determined by the borders of an electoral district.
6 The high frequency of referenda started a debate on whether this pattern has a negative influence on the role of parties in the political process in Ireland (Gallagher, Citation2011).
7 See for a compilation of results http://www.environ.ie/en/LocalGovernment/Voting/Referenda/PublicationsDocuments/FileDownLoad,1894,en.pdf (accessed 6 November 2014).
8 See http://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/creighton-replaced-as-d%C3%A1il-passes-new-abortion-law-1.1460261 (accessed 15 October 2014).
9 See, e.g. the Statement of the Archbishops of Ireland on Abortion, available at: http://www.catholicireland.net/arcbishops-legislate-abortion/ (accessed 6 November 2014).
10 It would, however, be possible to test related expectations if we would know more about individual TDs’ religious background (e.g. how often they attend religious services). One possibility to measure the religiosity of TDs would be to identify those who participated in the Oireachtas’ ‘prayer group’. This information is, however, not available.
11 A similar reasoning presumably underlies the finding that members of the US congress who have daughters are more likely to support a more liberal abortion regulation (Burden, Citation2007; see also Washington, Citation2008).
12 This is the hearing of the Joint Committee on Health and Children on the ‘Implementation of Government Decisions Following Expert Group Report into Matters Relating to A, B and C v. Ireland', available at: http://oireachtasdebates.oireachtas.ie/Debates%20Authoring/DebatesWebPack.nsf/committeetakes/HEJ2013010800002?opendocument. In this hearing, representatives of all major religious groups as well as several pro-life and pro-choice advocacy groups participated. The contributions were grouped by their stance taken on abortion, creating a pro- and an anti-abortion reference text. Both of these pooled reference texts include contributions from religious groups (e.g. the Presbyterian Churches’ strong pro-life standpoint in the pro-abortion reference text) as well as non-religious advocacy groups.
13 Though alternative variants of quantitative content analysis such as Wordfish (Slapin & Proksch, Citation2008) generally enable thorough analyses of plenary debates, the Wordscores technique seems to be most appropriate here given the special format of the abortion debates which were both characterised by frequent oral interpellations, procedural voting and filibustering.
14 Consequently, the measure on parenthood reflects the number of children the TDs had at the beginning of the legislative term.
15 The same applies to the group of Independents.
16 Another factor which might contribute to the low impact of the constituency-related variables may be of a methodological nature. The constituency-related data from the Irish National Election Study used here are based on constituency boundaries for the 2002 and 2007 general elections, respectively. With a number of changes in constituency boundaries before the general elections 2011, the constituency-related data from 2002 and 2007 do not fully represent current constituencies.