Generating Dissent : Voting Loyalty in the Legislature Under Different Electoral Systems

Do MPs’ change their voting behavior following an electoral reform? Under such circumstances, are there different explanations for MPs’ loyalty towards their PPGs? This paper answers these questions by investigating the individual variation in voting loyalty across two legislative terms using a sample of 26 high-stake roll call votes. Romania constitutes the ideal setting to test the impact of institutional design on MPs’ voting loyalty given its change of electoral logic from closed list PR to single member districts. Our multivariate OLS models (for all the MPs and for the incumbents) test for the effect of parliamentary experience, party membership duration, parliamentary rank, party hopping and demotion while also accounting for a number of socio-demographic controls. Results indicate that whereas voting loyalty does not substantially vary in various electoral settings, the determinants of such loyalty suffer relevant modifications