Lost on the way? Explaining Deviations between Parliamentary and Extra-parliamentary Positioning in the German Bundestag

Parties dominate the political process in parliamentary democracies. However, they consist of individuals with distinctive goals in terms of votes, policy and office that are not necessarily the same as party goals. Proksch/Slapin (2015) locate different negative and positive incentives of voicing dissent with the party at three steps from extra-parliamentary positions through parliamentary speeches to parliamentary votes. These steps differ with regard to party leadership control and public visibility (and thus cost-benefit calculations of voicing dissent for both the party and the MP). Just recently Schwarz et al. (2017) compared speech and voting positions by examining one debate in Swiss legislation; and also Baumann et al. (2013) studied deviations between different levels of parliamentary positioning in a very specific single non-whipped German motion. However, the approach of this paper is to search for more general patterns in the German case by combining three types of data. For the first time extra-parliamentary individual positions are systematically generated by applying Spatial Voting Analysis techniques to the “Kandidaten-Check” dataset by Abgeordnetenwatch.de (2013, 2017), which contains a 23-items questionnaire answered by most MPs during the campaigning for the 18th and 19th LP election. This cohesive source is ideally suited for extracting extra-parliamentary positions, since it represents direct signaling to the (district) voters. To generate parliamentary speech positions, wordscores are extracted from OffenesParlament (2017) for the speeches of the 18th LP and from the ParlSpeech dataset (Rauh et al. 2017) for earlier LPs. RCVs are used to approximate parliamentary voting positions. The aim is to describe and to find structural explanations for differences in deviations between positioning at these several stages. They are sought to be found, i.a., in the type of mandate, being a government MP, holding an (party) office, as well as alongside policy areas and timing during the election cycle.