Power or Ideology? What structures legislative voting behavior in Dutch municipal councils, ideology or coalition-opposition dynamics?

Legislative voting behavior has been a frequent topic in political science research. Most research has however focused on a single parliament and in particular the US Congress , which has largely shapen theories on voting behavior, and the European Parliament, though during the previous three decades there has been an increasing number of studies in different legislatures. The limitation to one parliament hampers the ability to pinpoint what factors determine how voting behavior is structured, as relevant factors often coincide (i.e. institutional rules and coalition types) and the variance in dependent variables is limited. Recent attempts by Hix and Noury (2016) and Louwerse et al (2017) to move the field into a more comparative direction have been only partially successful, as they study legislatures in countries which have different institutional settings, rules and regulations. Due to those different institutional settings, votes cannot be directly compared. This paper takes a different approach. Instead of comparing legislatures with different institutional settings, this paper will move beyond the national state and study differences in voting behavior in multiple subnational legislatures in a single country. Analyzing multiple subnational councils in a single country makes it possible to ensure institutional uniformity, but variance on other factors as coalition type and composition. This creates an opportunity to isolate factors that determine voting behavior. The choice for studying this topic at the subnational level, also expands the research on voting behavior to a still understudied area: local politics. Even though a large (and increasing) proportion of political decision-making takes place at the local and regional level, political scientists have as of yet paid more limited attention to subnational politics and on legislative behavior in particular. It is exactly this topic, which is the focus of this paper. Within the topic of legislative voting behavior, this paper focusses on what factors structure voting behavior. This paper will attempt to answer the question to what extent and under what conditions is legislative voting behavior in Dutch municipal councils structured by government-opposition dynamics instead of ideology? To answer this research question a combination of dyadic data with a linear regression analyses as applied by Van der Veer (2018, p. 68-73) to the European Parliament will be used. Compared to comparing multiple spatial models of voting behavior in and descriptives of different legislatures, this combination offers a much more systematic method to analyze what factors influence voting behavior, which also differentiates this paper from many previous comparative studies. For the execution of this research design an original dataset is used that includes hundreds of thousands of voting decision during tenthousands of votes in over forty Dutch municipal councils during the 2014-2018 term. This entails almost one seventh of Dutch municipal councils and is as such not only one of the largest datasets about municipal politics, but also one of the largest datasets on legislative voting behaviour in general. The included data was collected by scrapping voting results from council information systems with the Rvest package.