Why Attend Sessions When Reelection Is Certain? Evidence from the German Parliament

Does stiffer electoral competition reduce political rent-seeking behavior? For a micro-analysis of this question, I construct a new data set spanning the years 2005 to 2012 covering biographical and political information of German members of parliament (MPs), election results, and attendance rates in parliament. For the parliament elected in 2009, I show that indeed candidates who expect to face a close race in their district show significantly and relevantly lower absence rates in parliament beforehand. Politicians of governing parties seem to be less responsive to their vote margins. These results are confirmed by an analysis of the parliament elected in 2005 and also by employing an instrumental variable strategy exploiting convenient peculiarities of the German electoral system. To my knowledge this is the first study to create a measure for parliamentary absences in Germany and one of the first to look at the effect of political competition on absences. This paper is also the first to extend the analysis to MPs elected via party lists.