Replication Data for: Members of Parliament are minimally accountable for their issue stances (and they know it)

For incumbents to be accountable for their issue stances, voters must sanction incumbents whose positions are `out of step' with their own. We test the electoral accountability of British legislators for their stance on Brexit. We find that there is very limited issue accountability. Individual...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Hanretty, Chris, Mellon, Jon, English, Patrick
Format: Dataset
Sprache:eng
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:Volltext bestellen
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:For incumbents to be accountable for their issue stances, voters must sanction incumbents whose positions are `out of step' with their own. We test the electoral accountability of British legislators for their stance on Brexit. We find that there is very limited issue accountability. Individuals who disagreed with their representative's stance on Brexit were three percentage points less likely to vote for them. The aggregate consequences of these individual effects are limited. A one-standard deviation increase in the proportion of constituents agreeing with their incumbent's Brexit stance is associated with an increase of 0.56 percentage points in incumbent vote share. These effects are ~1.5 times larger when the main challenger has a different Brexit stance to the incumbent. A follow-up survey of Members of Parliament (MPs) shows that MPs' estimates of the effects of congruence are similar in magnitude. Our findings suggest that issue accountability is conditional in nature and limited in magnitude even for an issue such as Brexit which should be maximally amenable to such effects.
DOI:10.7910/dvn/kstd9j