Gründe für von der Fraktionsdisziplin abweichendes Abstimmungsverhalten bei Bundestagsabgeordneten

Alice Neuhäuser, Maike Mischler, Graeme Ruxton and Markus Neuhäuser ()

AStA Wirtschafts- und Sozialstatistisches Archiv, 2013, vol. 7, issue 1, 99 pages

Abstract: From 2005 to 2009, a grand coalition was formed during the 16th legislative period of the Bundestag, the German federal parliament, to support Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government. The three parties (CDU, CSU and SPD) which formed the grand coalition had an unusually large majority (represented more than 70 per cent of MPs in the parliament). In such a situation, an individual MP’s violation of party discipline in a vote is much less likely to have repercussions for the qualitative outcome of the vote, and so voting against the “party line” was much more frequent during this parliament. We exploited this unusual situation to explore the factors related to such violations, and confirm a recently published result (Sieberer in Elect. Stud. 29:484–496, 2010 ) that the way in which representatives are elected affects their behavior: the number of deviations from the party line was significantly lower for list MPs compared to those elected by a local constituency. In an important extension to Sieberer’s work, we show that this effect remains significant when controlling for personal characteristics such as age or secondary employment. Furthermore, we demonstrate that for those MPs elected directly, the likelihood that the MP would deviate from the party line in particular vote was smaller when that MP’s share of the vote in their constituency was higher. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013

Keywords: Abstimmungsverhalten; Deutscher Bundestag; Fraktionsdisziplin; Große Koalition; Statistische Analyse; Voting behavior; German Bundestag; Party discipline; Grand coalition; Statistical analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11943-013-0130-5

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