Rebels with a Cause?
نویسندگان
چکیده
Does a Member of the British Parliament’s voting record have any effect on their constituency electoral performance? Scholars have assumed not, else they have tested the proposition with an extremely limited number of roll calls. Congruent with public opinion findings we contend that, paradoxically, voters conditionally reward both ‘party unity’ and ‘independent mindedness’ in their elected representatives. Using novel non-parametric ‘random forest’ classification procedures, and a new data set recording behavior on over 2000 roll calls from 1997–2001 and 2001–2005, along with commensurate constituency controls, we thus show that MPs’ popularity is indeed affected by their legislative activity in small but significant ways. In particular, government-party voters demand unity on votes that are key parts of the government’s programmatic agenda, while welcoming more ‘maverick’ behavior on less important issues.
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