The Three Meaningful Votes: Voting on Brexit in the British House of Commons

Toke Aidt, Felix Grey and Alexandru Savu

Cambridge Working Papers in Economics from Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge

Abstract: Why do politicians rebel and vote against the party line when high stakes bills come to the floor of the legislature? To address this question, we leverage the three so-called Meaningful Votes that took place in the British House of Commons between January and March 2019 on the Withdrawal Agreement that the Conservative government had reached with the European Union. The bill was decisively defeated three times due to a major revolt amongst Conservative backbench Members of Parliament (MPs). We find that three factors influenced their rebellion calculus: the MP’s own ideological views, constituency preferences and career concerns. Somewhat paradoxically, the rebellion within the Conservative Party came from MPs who had supported Leave in the 2016 Brexit referendum and from MPs elected in Leave leaning constituencies.

Keywords: BREXIT; roll call votes; rebellions; party discipline; party coherence; House of Commons (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-08-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-eec, nep-int and nep-pol
Note: tsa23, fg313, ams269
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/pub ... pe-pdfs/cwpe1979.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: The Three Meaningful Votes: Voting on Brexit in the British House of Commons (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cam:camdae:1979

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cambridge Working Papers in Economics from Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jake Dyer ().