Costly Signals: Voter Responses to Parliamentary Dissent in Austria, Britain, and Germany

• Published date: 01 November 2020
• Author: Markus Wagner,Nick Vivyan,Konstantin Glinitzer
• Date: 01 November 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12274

645

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 45, 4, November 2020

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12274

MARKUS WAGNER

KONSTANTIN GLINITZER

University of Vienna

NICK VIVYAN

Durham University

Costly Signals: Voter Responses

to Parliamentary Dissent in Austria,

Britain, and Germany

When Members of Parliament (MPs) disagree publicly with their party,

this provides a signal to voters regarding both their political views and their

character valence. We argue that the strength of this signal to voters depends on

the personal career costs an MP incurs by dissenting. The greater the perceived

costs of dissent to the MP, the more positively voters should react to dissent. In

line with this theory, we use a series of conjoint analysis experiments in Britain,

Germany, and Austria to show that: (1) dissent has a more positive effect on voter

evaluations in systems where the costs of dissent are higher, and (2) more costly

types of dissent have a greater impact on voter evaluations. These findings have

important implications for understanding how voter evaluations of MPs depend

on beliefs about parliamentary systems and how parliamentary institutions con-

dition the link between voters and MPs.

Introduction

What do voters in parliamentary democracies think of legis-

lative representatives who dissent from the party line? Theories of

parliamentary behavior often posit assumptions about the electoral

reward (or personal vote) that legislators may or may not receive

for dissent, by which we mean any action by which a representative

signals disagreement with the party leadership (Benedetto and Hix

2007; Carey 2007; Kam 2009; Sieberer 2006; Slapin et al. 2018).

Motivated in part by the desire to unpack and test assumptions

about electoral rewards, a growing number of researchers have

studied whether voters reward parliamentary dissent and whether

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution

License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided

the original work is properly cited.

© 2019 The Authors. Legislative Studies Quarterly published by Wiley Periodicals,

Inc. on behalf of Washington University in St. Louis

646 Markus Wagner, Nick Vivyan, and Konstantin Glinitzer

they view it as a signal of policy position (e.g., Canes-Wrone,

Brady, and Cogan 2002; Kam 2009; Kirkland and Slapin 2018;

Pattie, Fieldhouse, and Johnston 1994) or of valence (Campbell et

al. 2019; Carson et al. 2010).1

However, whereas theories of legis-

lator dissent have increasingly emphasized the role of electoral and

legislative institutions in shaping the incentives of parliamentar-

ians (e.g., Benedetto and Hix 2007; Carey and Shugart 1995; Kam

2009; Slapin et al. 2018), there has been little corresponding re-

search examining whether and how voter reactions to dissent vary

in different settings and contexts (though see Doherty 2013).2

In

this article, we redress this imbalance by developing and testing a

theory of how voter reactions to dissent vary across and within po-

litical systems as a function of the context and type of that dissent.

Dissent allows MPs to stand up for what they believe in and

to signal to voters how their policy stances differ from those of the

party (Canes-Wrone, Brady, and Cogan 2002; Pattie, Fieldhouse,

and Johnston 1994; Proksch and Slapin 2015; Slapin et al. 2018;

Vivyan and Wagner 2012). If the policy position signalled by dis-

sent matters, then voters who are ideologically opposed to the

party line will respond positively to defection by MPs in the same

ideological direction (Ansolabehere and Jones 2010; Canes-Wrone,

Brady, and Cogan 2002). However, dissent may also be interpreted

as a costly signal of character valence (and not just position) by

voters (Campbell et al. 2019): voters may believe that MPs who dis-

sent possess desirable character traits such as resolve and trustwor-

thiness because they are willing to incur the personal career costs

of dissent. Parliamentary voting is not unique in this regard: other

types of costly legislative action, such as policy obstruction (Patty

2016) or ideologically suboptimal committee assignments (Patty et

al. 2019), might also be treated as signals of valence by voters. So

dissent may be interpreted in terms of both position and valence;

in this article, we focus on the latter type of voter response.

Based on the idea that dissent is in part a costly signal of va-

lence, we argue that voter reactions to dissent should vary across

and within political systems as a function of the cost of dissent.

We start from the observation that such costs are not constant. For

example, they vary by type of dissent: MPs may be punished more

for voting against their party in the legislature than for speaking

out in the media (Proksch and Slapin 2015). They also vary by

institutional setting: dissent may be punished more in contexts

where parliamentary parties have more carrots and sticks at their

647Costly signals

disposal (Kam 2009; Proksch and Slapin 2015; but see Kauder,

Potrafke, and Riem 2017).

We also argue that voters are aware, at least to some extent, of

the potential risks run by an MP who defects from the party line.

In other words, the institutional differences in the costs of dissent

affect voter perceptions of how costly dissent is. Moreover, voters

are also aware that different types of dissent exist, and thatthese

carry different costs for MPs. Voter evaluations of an MP will in

turn be more affected by dissent when that dissent is seen as more

costly. Hence, we expect voters to discount actions that may not

reveal much about MPs’ character and beliefs.

We develop two key observable implications arising from this

argument. First, the positive impact of dissent on voter evalua-

tions of an MP should be greater in institutional settings where

dissent is more costly, at least to the extent that voters are aware

of these costs. Second, within a political system, different types of

dissent—for example, dissent in the media versus dissenting votes

in parliamentary votes—should have different effects on voter

evaluations of an MP, with a greater effect for those types of dis-

sent seen as incurring greater career costs.

We test our expectations by running conjoint analysis ex-

periments (Hainmueller, Hopkins, and Yamamoto 2014) where

respondents are asked to rate pairs of hypothetical Members of

Parliament (MPs) characterized by several randomly varying at-

tributes, including their dissent behavior. Importantly, we also

include information on the policy preferences of the MP as well

as party affiliation, characteristics that might otherwise be asso-

ciated with (or “aliased” by) dissent (Hainmueller, Hopkins, and

Yamamoto 2014).

We ran these experiments on samples of voters in three coun-

tries: Austria, Britain, and Germany. The different legislative and

electoral institutions in these countries cause variation in the ob-

jective costs of dissent, which should in turn affect the perceived

costs of dissent and thus the value of dissent as a valence signal for

voters. Austria, Britain, and Germany are suitable cases to study

because the costs of dissent vary across the three countries due to

the nature of the electoral systems and the forms of parliamen-

tary and party organization. We argue that the costs of dissent

are highest in Austria and lowest in Britain, and this should affect

voter perceptions of and reactions to such behavior. Our conjoint

analyses also include varying types of dissent and additional ques-

tions concerning the perceived costs of dissent to MPs and their