Do voters reward rebellion? The electoral accountability of MPs in Britain

Vivyan, Nick; Wagner, Markus

doi:10.1111/j.1475-6765.2011.01998.x

Do voters reward rebellion? The electoral accountability of MPs in Britain

Vivyan, Nick; Wagner, Markus

Authors

Professor Nick Vivyan nick.vivyan@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Markus Wagner

Abstract

To hold their Members of Parliament individually accountable for their legislative behaviour, British voters would need to base their decision to vote for an MP at least partially on the extent to which the MP's legislative voting behaviour deviated from that of the MP's party leadership. Voters should evaluate this deviation contingent on their views of the party leadership. MP rebellion can signal that voter–MP congruence is greater than that of the voter and the MP's party leadership. In this article it is found that only constituents with negative attitudes toward the Labour government reward rebellious Labour MPs, albeit to a limited extent. A similar conditional association is not observed on a single issue: Iraq. The policy accountability of MPs is relatively weak and general rather than issue-specific.

Citation

Vivyan, N., & Wagner, M. (2012). Do voters reward rebellion? The electoral accountability of MPs in Britain. European Journal of Political Research, 51(2), 235-264. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6765.2011.01998.x

Journal Article Type	Article
Publication Date	Mar 1, 2012
Deposit Date	Jul 8, 2011
Publicly Available Date	May 6, 2016
Journal	European Journal of Political Research
Print ISSN	0304-4130
Electronic ISSN	1475-6765
Publisher	Wiley
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	51
Issue	2
Pages	235-264
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6765.2011.01998.x
Keywords	Accountability, British politics, Legislative behaviour, Single-member districts, Voting behaviour.

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Copyright Statement
This is the accepted version of the following article: Vivyan, Nick & Wagner, Markus (2012), Do voters reward rebellion? The electoral accountability of MPs in Britain. European Journal of Political Research, 51(2): 235-264, which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6765.2011.01998.x. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance With Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving.