Submissive Lobby Fodder or Assertive Political Actors? Party Loyalty of Career Politicians in the UK House of Commons, 2005–15

• Published date: 01 May 2018
• Author: Raphael J. Heuwieser
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12184
• Date: 01 May 2018

RAPHAEL J. HEUWIESER

University of Oxford

Submissive Lobby Fodder or

Assertive Political Actors? Party

Loyalty of Career Politicians in

the UK House of Commons,

2005–15

Are career politician members of parliament (MPs) more or less likely to vote

against the party line than their peers? Despite growing interest in the behavior of career

politicians across parliamentary systems, answers to this question are marked by consid-

erable theoretical and empirical uncertainty. I derive the two most common (but

opposing) behavioral predictions before testing them over all legislative votes of two

UK House of Commons terms (2005–15) using multilevel modeling of new and disag-

gregated data on MPs’ occupational backgrounds. The finding that career politicians are

more likely to rebel challenges conventional wisdom and provides an important

empirical foundation for the ongoing debate.

How does the occupational background of a member of parliament

(MP) impact his or her party loyalty in legislative voting? Across parlia-

mentary systems, increasing numbers of career politician MPs

1

regularly

stir public opinion and have led academics, the media, and political

insiders to hypothesize about the incentives and motivations guiding this

type of parliamentarian (e.g., Cowley 2005; Herzog 1990; King 1981;

Lorenz and Micus 2013; Marshall-Andrews 2011; Norton 1999; Oborne

2007; Patzelt 1999; Riddell 1993; R€

oper 2005; Saalfeld 1997; Savoie

2014; Scarrow 1997). Despite this intense public and scholarly

“fascination” with career politicians (Allen 2012, 686), we still lack a

robust understanding of how and why an MP’s career background might

impact his or her legislative behavior.

Both theoretical and empirical limitations in existing contributions

are responsible for this uncertainty. First, hypotheses concerning the

party loyalty of career politicians are often poorly specif‌ied or defended

in the literature and have usually developed from loosely structured

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 43, 2, May 2018 305

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12184

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C2017 Washington University in St. Louis

intuitions or as byproducts of other theories (e.g., Cowley 2005;

Douglas 1984; Kam 2006; Norton 1999; Patzelt 1999; Riddell 1993).

Many of the underlying behavioral assumptions are made with little criti-

cal engagement, often in a manner suggesting that the author believes to

be merely stating the obvious. Moreover, the two main hypotheses make

diametrically opposing predictions. The more established claim—which

can also be described as the conventional wisdom—emphasizes the high

value that career politicians are assumed to attach to frontbench promo-

tion, which in turn should make them most loyal to the party as the

distributor of such goods (e.g., Cowley 2005; Kam 2006; Norton 1999;

Patzelt 1999; R€

oper 2005; Schwarz and Lambert 1971). The alternative

view argues that these MPs should in fact be less loyal than their peers

given their greater political involvement, desire for scrutiny or assertive-

ness, as well as an intrinsic unwillingness to be used as “lobby fodder”

(King 1981, 280; Cowley 2005; Riddell 1993). With each of the claims

theoretically plausible, the f‌irst part of this study serves to clarify and

juxtapose the assumptions and behavioral mechanisms underpinning

these theories, thereby providing new and much needed structure to our

theoretical understanding of the question at hand.

Second, the existing uncertainty suggests the need for further

empirical investigation, especially given the limitations of previous

efforts. Political insiders have provided anecdotal and indirect evidence

at best (e.g., Amery 1992; Marshall-Andrews 2011), while academic

contributions have largely contented themselves with univariate and

aggregate-level observations (e.g., Cowley 2005; King 1981; but see

Kam’s (2006) use of a relevant MP-level variable). To help f‌ill this gap

at the individual level, I analyze MPs’ vote choices over all legislative

votes from two UK House of Commons terms (2005–15). The main rea-

son for this case selection is that the competing behavioral expectations

have developed predominantly with parliamentary systems in mind,

while the relevant academic and public debate is especially pronounced

in the UK context. A more detailed justif‌ication of the case selection

follows below.

I test the theories using newly collected, disaggregated data of

career backgrounds and other biographical information on more than

860 MPs. The analysis of these data through multilevel models of over

1.5 million legislative vote choices represents, to my knowledge, the f‌irst

systematic and micro-level investigation of career politicians’ party

loyalty in a parliamentary system. I f‌ind that career politician MPs are

signif‌icantly more likely to vote against the party line than their non-

career politician peers, a result that strongly challenges the received wis-

dom. Direction and statistical signif‌icance of the effect hold across

306 Raphael J. Heuwieser

parties, within each of the two parliamentary terms and among MPs in

different stages of their parliamentary tenure.

In addition to challenging the common perception on this topic,

the article adds to the relevant debate dominated by two related con-

cerns: that a rise in career politicians renders legislatures less

representative of society (e.g., Kirkup 2014; Oborne 2007) and that these

MPs are out of touch with the problems of ordinary citizens (e.g., Allen

2012; Groves 2012; Kellner 2014). While this debate is justif‌iable from

a normative viewpoint concerning descriptive representation, systematic

analysis of the actual behavior of career politicians remains largely

absent. However, this behavioral “so what” question is especially timely

and pertinent given the predominantly negative opinion of career politi-

cians on the one hand (e.g., Groves 2012; Kellner 2014) and the

electorate’s growing demand for more independent-minded MPs on the

other (e.g., Bowler 2010; Campbell et al. 2016; Kam 2009). By system-

atically testing claims about career politicians’ willingness to vote

against their party, I introduce a stronger behavioral perspective and

provide a broader theoretical and empirical foundation for the ongoing

debate.

Beyond its topical relevance, this study contributes to the academic

literature seeking to explain MP-level variation of party loyalty in parlia-

mentary systems (e.g., Benedetto and Hix 2007; Cowley and Childs

2003; Hanretty, Lauderdale, and Vivyan 2016; Kam 2006, 2009;

Sieberer 2010; Tavits 2009). It is thereby also contextualized by a fast-

growing wave of MP-level work asking how individual characteristics

or socioeconomic background such as gender, ethnicity, local political

experience, or religious denomination can help explain MP-level varia-

tion within various legislative activities (e.g., B€

ack, Debus, and M€

uller

2014; Baumann, Debus, and M€

uller 2015; Cowley and Childs 2003;

Saalfeld 2011; Tavits 2009). By showing that an MP’s career back-

ground can play an important role in inf‌luencing the individual’s

legislative vote choices, the article adds a previously understudied angle

to these existing efforts at providing a more holistic understanding of

legislative behavior.

Party Loyalty of Career Politicians: The Theoretical Arguments

The Career Politician as a Frontbench-Seeking Loyalist

The most established (but, thus far, almost exclusively theoretical)

prediction in both the relevant literature as well as the larger debate in

the United Kingdom and other parliamentary systems is that career

307Submissive Lobby Fodder or Assertive Political Actors?