Vote-Earning in Parliament: Explaining the Parliamentary Behaviour of Czech and Polish Deputies

To date, few analyses have discussed parliamentary voting patterns in countries of Central and Eastern Europe, yet some democracies of this region may be particularly interesting due to the extensive use of the roll call votes. Our paper aims at closing this gap, by analyzing the voting cohesion of political parties as well as legislators’ ideal-points and vote defection in the Czech and the Polish Parliaments. We collected data containing individual voting records of all legislators during the most recent parliamentary terms from both countries covering more than 14000 votes. Besides exploring the degree of party-unity and conflict dimensionality in these parliaments, our paper investigates how voters respond to MPs legislative vote records. As shown by Crisp et al. (2013) for Slovakia, less disciplined legislators are likely to receive more votes. Since Poland and the Czech Republic use different preference voting rules, we explore whether these findings can be generalized.