Assuming politicians are office-seekers (Rabushka and Shepsle, 1971) motivated to gain re-election and/or support the party, we might expect MPs to focus on those issues that their party has a reputation for competence on (Budge and Farlie, 1983, and Petrocik, 1996), as well as upon those issues that are most prescient in the minds of the electorate (Bélanger and Meguid, 2008). However, this literature focuses on assessments made during election campaigns per se rather than campaigning that occurs during highly visible and publicised legislative procedures such as Prime Minister’s Questions. This matters because the dynamics are very different (e.g. Government backbenchers might eschew these strategies and opt instead for congratulatory ‘questioning’ to counter PM unpopularity). Controlling for seniority, marginality, MP issue interests, this paper uses PMQs data from 1997 to 2019 to examine the political campaign strategies of MPs outside of the traditional campaigning arenas studied to date to see the extent being an MP from the government side effects behaviour, and what this means for the applicability and validity of issue ownership and wave riding theory.
