What drives individual MPs’ positioning and voting behavior? While this question is at the heart of a large literature analyzing representation and voting behavior in the US-Congress, the same question has featured far less prominently in research on legislators’ behavior in Western European parliaments. This is partly due to the perception of parties as unitary actors which results in equating party preferences with MPs’ standpoints. However, even those strands of literature that have focused on MPs’ incentives to deviate from their parliamentary party line have largely emphasized institutional factors determining party discipline.
At the same time research on positioning and voting behavior of members of the US Congress has identified significant influences of individual MPs’ characteristics - such as ethnicity, gender and religious denomination – on their legislative actions. Despite the marked differences in institutional settings, the present study argues that this line of reasoning can be translated to the context of Western European parliaments. We argue that MPs’ personal traits are an important factor in explaining legislators’ decisions on issues where positions along party lines have not (yet) crystallized.
With advances in medical and natural sciences these un-crystallized issues have experienced an enormous growth, typically pitting religious principles and morality on one side against expanding medical and biotechnological possibilities on the other side. To test our expectation, we chose the debate on a regulatory framework for Pre-implantational Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) in the German Bundestag as a first case study. The German PGD-vote had been declared a “conscience vote” and was thus free from parliamentary disciplining. We demonstrate that under these circumstances MPs’ personal characteristics provide significant explanatory power beyond explanations resting on ideology or constituency characteristics.
