Voting Without the Party: Voting Behaviour on Issues of Conscience in the German Bundestag (1949-2020)

This paper analyses voting behaviour on issues that are generally excluded from the analysis of legislative behaviour, namely so-called issues of conscience. As party unity is not enforced on these issues, the literature has assumed that these votes provide no information on the logic behind an MPs’ voting behaviour, as this can generally be derived from the party’s position. Identifying the growing number of topics on which the party leadership decides to abstain from enforcing voting unity, knowing how individual MPs actually vote when there is no official party position, and discussing whether this may lead to problems of accountability as suggested by Cowley (1998), significantly adds to our understanding of how legislatures, parties, and representation work. This paper seeks to answer these questions by identifying all votes of conscience in the German Bundestag (1949 – 2020), analysing the topics which are dealt with as votes of conscience, and exploring the drives of floor voting at the individual MP level on these topics.