Who Cares About Parliamentary Work? How Voter Characteristics Condition the Incumbency Effect

A growing body of research highlights the impact of parliamentary work on MPs’ electoral performance and re-election prospects. This impact extends beyond constituency service to include electoral benefits for attendance at plenary sessions, legislative initiatives, committee work and scrutiny of the executive (Papp & Russo, 2018). Yet the existence of an overall effect does not imply that all voters weigh this work equally when making their choices. Indeed, voters may be subject to various biases when retrospectively assessing incumbents’ performance (Huber et al., 2012). This paper therefore asks: which voters are more directly responsive to the past performance of incumbent MPs, whether in terms of parliamentary activity, party loyalty, or personal probity? While partisanship constitutes an obvious source of bias in voters’ retrospective evaluations of their representatives, voter competence and attitude to politics should also be considered. The study therefore hypothesises that voters’ individual characteristics—such as education, political preferences, and psychological traits—condition the impact of parliamentary performance on electoral behaviour. The empirical focus is on the French National Assembly, a least-likely case given its institutional weakness (François & Navarro 2019). Drawing on survey data collected during the 2024 snap legislative elections (N = 1,200), combined with data on incumbents’ records and constituency-level characteristics, this paper examines how voter attributes and contextual factors shape the likelihood of taking past parliamentary performance into account when voting. Preliminary findings indicate that in line with our hypotheses more competent and more politically interested voters are more responsive to the past performance of incumbent MPs. This paper would be a good fit for Panel 6 ‘Voter-elites linkage’.