Preferences, party discipline and constituency
pressure in Swiss parliamentary decisions1

Stefanie Bailer, Sarah Bütikofer,2 Simon Hug,3 and Tobias Schulz
CIS, IPZ, Universität Zürich
Département de science politique, Université de Genève

First preliminary version: August 29, 2007, this version: May 14, 2008

Abstract

Research on legislative behavior has tried to assess for some time how parliamentarians are influenced in their voting decisions by the disciplining efforts of their party and their constituency's preferences. Theory would suggest that the influence of these two principals of members of parliament depend on the way in which candidates for elected office are selected and how, once selected as candidates, they are elected. Empirical research so far provided suggestive evidence for these effects, but this evidence is based on hardly systematic work. Taking advantage of a feature of the Swiss lower house, namely that some members are elected in majoritarian elections and others in proportional representation, and combining this with information from a series of roll call votes, we are able to demonstrate these party and constituency effects in detail and show that they vary according to the electoral system. In addition, since we can control systematically for the parliamentarians' preferences, we can avoid an additional pitfall that many studies face in this literature.

Footnotes:

1   Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the ECPR General Conference in Pisa (September 6-8, 2007), the Annual Conference of the SVPW in Balstahl, (November 22-23, 2007) and the Annual Meeting of the MPSA in Chicago (April 3-6, 2008). Thanks are due to Thomas Däubler and other participants for their comments, Michael Cemerin, Flavia Fossati, Fabian Wagner for their research assistance, and to the Swiss Parlamentsdienste , particularly Ernst Frischknecht and Andreas Sidler, and Michael Herrmann, Heiri Leuthold and Daniel Schwarz for making available various portions of the data used in this paper. Financial support by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant No 100012-111909) is gratefully acknowledged.

2  Center for Comparative and International Studies; Institut für Politikwissenschaft; Universität Zürich; Hirschengraben 56; 8001 Zürich; Switzerland

3  Département de science politique, Faculté des sciences économiques et sociales; Université de Genève; 40 Bd du Pont d'Arve; 1211 Genève 4; Switzerland; phone ++41 22 379 83 78; email: simon.hug@politic.unige.ch



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