ONGOING RESEARCH
Does opposition parties’ legislative behavior increase voter turnout? (with Filip Kostelka, University of Essex and EUI; Or Tuttnauer, MZES Mannheim; Roi Zur, University of Essex)
Recent research has shown that opposition parties’ legislative behavior is related to their electoral outcomes. That is, opposition parties that consistently vote against government bills in parliament tend to be more electorally successful. We contribute to this literature by arguing theoretically and demonstrating empirically that parliamentary conflict between the opposition and the government increases voter turnout, in addition to the opposition parties vote shares. Specifically, we argue that when there is a clear distinction between the two sides of the aisle, voters perceive the election as more consequential and salient, and therefore are motivated to turn out to vote. We test our theory using both aggregate and individual-level analyses for 12 advanced-industrial democracies and show that turnout is higher when government-opposition relations are characterized by more conflict. Our results have important implications for parties’ and legislators’ voting behavior in parliament, party unity, and democratic accountability.
COMPLETED RESEARCH
Voting for Votes: Opposition Parties Legislative Activity and Electoral Outcomes (with Or Tuttnauer, MZES Mannheim)
Scholars frequently expect parties to act strategically in parliament, hoping to affect their electoral fortunes. Voters assumingly assess parties by their activity and vote accordingly. However, the retrospective voting literature looks mostly at the government´s outcomes, leaving the opposition understudied. We argue that, for opposition parties, legislative voting constitutes an effective vote-seeking activitiy as a signaling tool of their attitude towards the government. We suggest that conflictual voting behavior affects voters through two mechanisms: as a signal of opposition valence and as a means of ideological differentiation from the government. We present both aggregate- and indidividual-level analyses, leveraging a dataset of 169 party observations from 10 democracies and linking it to the CSES survey data.
Published article:
Tuttnauer, Or and Simone Wegmann. 2022. Voting for Votes: Opposition Parties´Legislative Activity and Electoral Outcomes. American Political Science Review 116(4): 1357-1374. Article (open access)
Opposition in Newly Democratised Countries (with Aurélien Evequoz)
A large literature exists examining the functions of legislatures and the behaviour of MPs in established democracies. But, little efforts have been made to observe how MPs behave in new democratic assemblies. This article seeks to address this shortcoming through an exploration of the use of parliamentary questions in two new democracies: Kenya and Zambia. Analysing an innovative dataset we present one of the few attempts to directly measure legislative behaviour in new democracies. We examine how the factors found in the literature on parliamentary questions in liberal democracies react to this shift of context and to what degree legislatures in these countries full their core functions. Results show that opposition MPs are not necessarily among the most active but that electoral incentives such as the margin by which MPs have won their seat or the number of voters they represent explain the use and content of parliamentary questions.
Published article:
Wegmann, Simone and Aurélien Evequoz. 2019. Legislative Functions in Newly Democratized Countries: The Use of Parliamentary Questions in Kenya and Zambia. The Journal of Legislative Studies 25(4): 443-465. Article
Simone Wegmann 