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Incentives for non-participation: absence in the United Kingdom House of Commons, 1997–2015

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Abstract

The ability to hold MPs accountable for their actions is one of the cornerstones of modern representative democracy. While it is important for MPs to send signals to both their constituents and to their party, a large number of MPs remain absent from votes. Those absences are an important part of the MP’s toolbox, but absences carry limitations, rooted in electoral and political constraints. We investigate how—conditional on the electoral cycle—some well-established political constraints along the government and opposition lines vary in strength. We examine the absence probabilities of MPs in the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2015, and find that as the next elections are approaching, political constraints somewhat weaken and electoral ones take over, but marked differences emerge between parliamentary sessions.

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Notes

  1. Despite the rare-event nature of rebellions, much more attention has been given to those situations where MPs vote against their party (Cowley, 2002; Benedetto & Hix, 2007; Slapin, 2018). While evidence from the US suggests that there is little effect of rebelling (Donnelly, 2019), survey evidence from the United Kingdom suggests some electoral benefits to be gained by rebelling (Campbell, 2019).

  2. A possibility is to vote in both the Aye and No lobbies, although this is extremely infrequent in use, and also used if a member has voted in the wrong lobby to nullify their original vote (Divisions in the House of Commons: House of Commons Background Paper, Standard Note: SN/PC/06401, Last updated: 2 August 2013).

  3. For the potential role of institutional constraints see Fortunato and Provins (2017).

  4. Given the presence of Opposition days, they have yet another advantage in terms of planning and concentrated discussion of proposals from the opposition side, which they might want to avoid.

  5. Acts and Statutory Instruments: The volume of UK legislation 1950 to 2016. House of Commons Briefing Paper CBP 7438, 21 April 2017.

  6. While the literature on selection effects in using parliamentary voting is important (see Carrubba, 2006; Hug, 2010) this is primarily the case when wishing to estimate a latent dimension through some form of ideal point estimation. In this respect, our aim is to capture who is absent and under what circumstances they are absent and as such the problem of potential bias in the votes becomes less of an issue.

  7. In total, we have 25 MPs who changed parties within one legislature, which includes also those who went independent or first independent and then to another party, or any trajectory essentially. Some of these would have been excluded for other reasons as well, such as 2001 David Burnside and Jeffrey Donaldson who were from Northern Ireland, or 2010 Mark Reckless and Douglas Carswell who triggered a by-election (see next data reduction point).

  8. We ascertained ministerial roles based on official records of governmental composition and parliamentary records. Ministers are defined as Cabinet Ministers and Ministers of State who are allowed to attend Cabinet. We refitted our models by including a control for ministers and for by-election entries and exits, and our results do not change. Unsurprisingly, for example, the minister dummy is associated with a large positive effect on absence probability.

  9. Our results are unchanged if we count remaining days with sessions held.

  10. We are not concerned with when an MP announces her retirement (see Willumsen & Goetz,2017), but the notion that they do not run for reelection and have entered a potentially disengaging career stage (Bailer & Ohmura, 2018), no longer suffering from an electoral constraint. It is also likely that the timing of announcement of retirement is not equal to when the actual decision was made and when the potential impact began.

  11. Constituency majority figures are from “The British Parliamentary Constituency Database, 1992-2005, Release 1.3” (Norris, 2005) and the “May 6th 2010 British General Election Constituency Results Release 5.0” (Norris, 2010).

  12. For example, Sir Peter Tapsell represented Nottingham West from 1959 until losing his seat at the 1964 election. He re-entered parliament at the 1966 election for what is now Louth and Horncastle. In this case, his seniority would be calculated from taking his first year of entry as 1959.

  13. We chose the starting point because even if MPs take the train, it is likely that they will do it from the larger towns or cities. It is not known how MPs get to Westminster, but even if there are minor differences between driving distance and distance for the train or plane for that matter, we believe there is no systematic bias given by constituency.

  14. Likelihood based model fit comparisons indicate significant model misfit reduction at each step.

  15. AIC is 2936480 and BIC is 2936711 for a model with all controls, but without the interaction between electoral cycle and government. This is significantly worse fitting than our full model, including the interaction (\(\chi ^2 = 38.236, p < 0.001\)).

  16. Regarding the control variables, in this specification the effect of seniority is substantially larger and the previously not significant constituency majority positive effect is now significant, but still quite small.

  17. Alternatively, we can add the legislature identifier variables to the interaction, generating a three-way interaction and some additional two-way interactions. Fitting that model, our results are identical.

  18. Noteworthy, for the 1997–2001 legislature, accounting for the non-linearity indicates a flattening out of opposition absence increase towards the end of the session, but this is not something that we see in the other legislature.

  19. More precisely, we estimate a general trajectory and change in the slope in the second parliament.

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  1. Department of International Economics, Government and Business, Copenhagen Business School, Porcelænshaven 24A+B, 2000, Frederiksberg, Denmark

    Zoltán Fazekas

  2. Department of Social and Political Sciences, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH, UK

    Martin Ejnar Hansen

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  1. Zoltán Fazekas
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Correspondence to Zoltán Fazekas.

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Fazekas, Z., Hansen, M.E. Incentives for non-participation: absence in the United Kingdom House of Commons, 1997–2015. Public Choice 191, 51–73 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-021-00950-6

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