Cheap talk or travelling rebelling? Party loyalty in individual campaigns and in parliamentary votes in the German mixed member system

The question whether parliamentary behavior reflects the content of electoral campaigns is central to the accountability principal of democratic representation. It is located at the heart of the responsible party model of democratic representation. If campaigns did not make a difference in parliamentary behavior, the whole election would be needless and elected actors’ legitimacy to speak on behalf of their voters would be obsolete. At the party level, there is some literature on fulfilling election pledges, but there has been surprisingly little academic work on this question at the individual legislator level. Only very few studies examine the connection between electoral campaigns and parliamentary behavior. Most studies in the European context concentrate on valence attributes of campaign personalization, like campaign norm or campaign intensity, but ignore actual campaign content. This study attempts to fill this gap by shedding light on the connection between individual campaign position taking and parliamentary position taking. The research question is whether campaign position taking is just cheap talk or whether components travel to the parliamentary stage. To analyze this question, I use the “Kandidaten-Check” vote advice application (VAA) for the 2009, 2013 and 2017 German Bundestag election, which contains a 32-, 24- respectively 22-items questionnaire answered by 80 per cent of the elected legislators during campaigning. The German candidate VAA is ideally suited for extracting individual campaigning positions as it covers a broader set of policy issues than the German candidate survey and has tremendously higher response rates. Even more importantly, it captures the pre-electoral policy positions that candidates directly send to their local constituencies and thus provides more direct insights into campaign communication activity than attitudinal measures from surveys. Combining the VAA data with data on Bundestag roll call voting behavior 2009-2020, I show that there are effects of the campaigning loyalty on the parliamentary party loyalty for the CDU/CSU, SPD and Greens. This finding is surprising in the German political system, because in party-centered systems candidates are usually assumed to have little leeway in roll call votes to deviate from the party line. By showing that even in contexts of high levels of party discipline, rebellious candidates also tend to become rebellious legislators, I demonstrate that party loyalty in individual campaigns is a suitable measure for the degree of policy conflict between a candidate’s national party and competing principals. Making use of the mixed-member structure in the German electoral system, I moreover show that the translation from campaigning to parliamentary position taking is conditioned by the dependence on the party, because the results suggest that district legislators are more likely to exhibit travelling rebelling than list legislators. Finding correlations between campaigning and parliamentary position taking is normatively spoken good for the quality of the representative democracy and shows a functioning system according to the responsible party model. The findings moreover show that taking the policy conflict among competing principals into account allows more accurate predictions about how institutional attributes like the mode of election affect the legislators’ parliamentary party loyalty.