Nick Vivyan

Representative misconduct, voter perceptions and accountability: Evidence from the 2009 House of Commons expenses scandal.

This paper examines electoral accountability after the 2009–10 UK expenses scandal. Existing research shows that Members of Parliament (MPs) implicated in the scandal fared only marginally worse in the election than non-implicated colleagues. This lack of electoral accountability for misconduct could have arisen either because voters did not know about their representatives wrongdoing or because they chose not to electorally sanction them. We combine panel survey data with new measures of MP implication in the expenses scandal to test where electoral accountability failed. We find that MP implication influenced voter perceptions of wrongdoing more than expected. In contrast, constituents were only marginally less likely to vote for MPs who were implicated in the scandal. Electoral accountability may therefore be constrained even when information about representative misconduct is easily available and clearly influences voter perceptions.

House or home? : Constituent preferences over legislator effort allocation

In many political systems legislators face a fundamental trade-off between allocating effort to constituency service and to national policy-making activities, respectively. How do voters want their elected representatives to solve this trade-off? This article provides new insights into this question by developing a conjoint analysis approach to estimating voters’ preferences over their legislators effort allocation. This approach is applied in Britain, where it is found that effort allocation has a significant effect on voter evaluations of legislators, even in a political system where other legislator attributes – in particular, party affiliation – might be expected to predominate. This effect is nonlinear, with voters generally preferring a moderate balance of constituency and national policy work. Preferences over legislator effort allocation are not well-explained by self-interest or more broadly by instrumental considerations. They are, however, associated with voters’ local-cosmopolitan orientation, suggesting that heuristic reasoning based on underlying social dispositions may be more important in determining preferences over representative activities.

Legislator dissent as a valence signal

Existing research suggests that voters tend to respond positively to legislator independence due to two types of mechanism. First, dissent has an indirect effect, increasing a legislator’s media coverage and personal recognition among constituents ( profile effects ). Secondly, constituents react positively to dissent when this signals that the legislator has matching political or representational preferences ( conditional evaluation ). This article presents a third effect: dissent acts as a valence signal of integrity and trustworthiness. Consistent with the valence signalling mechanism, it uses new observational and experimental evidence to show that British voters have a strong and largely unconditional preference for legislators who dissent. The findings pose a dilemma for political systems that rely on strong and cohesive parties.

From Doves to Hawks: A Spatial Analysis of Voting in the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, 1997-2007

This paper examines the making of UK monetary policy between 1997 and 2007 using an analysis of voting behaviour in the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). We use a Bayesian method to estimate the interest rate policy preferences of the MPC members on a ‘dove-hawk’ scale. Then, by comparing the ‘ideal points’ of outgoing members with their successors, we find evidence that MPC composition complements the fiscal policies pursued by the government. The revealed preferences of the MPC members suggest three distinct groups; ‘the doves’, who favour lower interest rates than the median committee member; ‘the centrists’, whose revealed preferences are in line with the median committee member; and ‘the hawks’, who favour higher interest rates than the median committee member. Our analysis suggests that the ‘opposition’ to the centrist group changes from the doves to the hawks as the spending policies of the government ceased to be constrained by the 1997 electoral promise to maintain conservative spending plans.

Corruption, accountability, and gender : do female politicians face higher standards in public life?

Previous research suggests that female politicians face higher standards in public life, perhaps in part because female voters expect more from female politicians than from male politicians. Most of this research is based on observational evidence. We assess the relationship between accountability and gender using a novel survey vignette experiment fielded in the United Kingdom in which voters choose between a hypothetical incumbent (who could be male or female, corrupt or noncorrupt) and another candidate. We do not find that female politicians face significantly greater punishment for misconduct. However, the effect of politician gender on punishment varies by voter gender, with female voters in particular more likely to punish female politicians for misconduct. Our findings have implications for research on how descriptive representation affects electoral accountability and on why corruption tends to correlate negatively with women’s representation.

Decomposing public opinion variation into ideology,idiosyncrasy and instability

We propose a method for decomposing variation in the issue preferences that US citizens express on surveys into three sources of variability that correspond to major threads in public opinion research. We find that, averaging across a set of high-profile US political issues, a single ideological dimension accounts for about 1/7 of opinion variation, individuals’ idiosyncratic preferences account for about 3/7, and response instability for the remaining 3/7. These shares vary substantially across issue types, and the average share attributable to ideology doubles when a second ideological dimension is permitted. We also find that (unidimensional) ideology accounts for almost twice as much response variation (and response instability is substantially lower) among respondents with high, rather than low, political knowledge. Our estimation strategy is based on an ordinal probit model with random effects and is applicable to other data sets that include repeated measurements of ordinal issue position data.

Where Did Electoral Accountability Fail? MP Misconduct, Constituent Perceptions and Vote Choice

Many voters know little about their MPs, so we would not expect many constituents to have known whether their MP was involved in the expenses scandal or not. Yet, we show evidence from the British Election Study (BES) internet panel that, in general, voters’ perceptions of their MP’s behaviour did correspond, at least somewhat, to their actual involvement in the scandal. Nevertheless, it is also the case that almost half of voters did not know whether their MP was involved in the scandal, and perceptions were also biased by political predispositions. Moreover, voters did not punish their MPs for their perceived misconduct: the link between perceptions and vote choice was weak compared to that between publicly available information and perceptions.