Suchergebnisse

How do parties at different levels of government get their representatives to vote according to the party line? Employing the sequential decision-making approach to party unity, we explore the relative importance of cue-taking, party agreement, party loyalty, and party discipline as individual representative decision-making mechanisms. On the basis of the Dutch version of the PartiRep comparative Member of Parliament survey, we find few differences between national and subnational representatives when it comes to the first two mechanisms, but party loyalty and party discipline seem to play a less important role in determining representatives' decision whether to vote with the party group line. This is, in part, in line with our theoretical expectation that subnational representatives are less likely to be motivated by office-seeking and vote-seeking than their national counterparts.

This research note introduces the Dutch Parliamentary Behaviour Dataset, a record of parliamentary (voting) behaviour in the Dutch Tweede Kamer (Second Chamber, House of Representatives) since 1945. The Dutch Parliament was often excluded from past comparative work on legislative (voting) behaviour because behavioural data were not available in an accessible format. By digitizing the parliamentary archives and compiling the data in a structured format, we have created a comparatively rich dataset, that is made publically accessible for other researchers. In this research note, we describe the dataset and data collection process and provide some examples as how the data might be used in the growing quantitative literature on legislative behaviour.