Dyadic Representation in a Westminster System

Abstract

In Westminster systems characterised by cohesive national parties, is there any room for meaningful dyadic representation, whereby the ideological outlook and legislative behaviour of individual Members of Parliament reflects the political preferences of their constituents? Research on this question has until now been impeded by difficulties in measuring constituency-level opinion and individual MP preferences. In this paper, we focus on Britain and use multilevel regression and post-stratification to generate constituency level measures of opinion on economic issues, the European Union and same sex marriage. We find that constituency opinion on these issues is associated with MP preference variation within parties, as measured based on un-whipped legislative behaviour. Our findings thus suggest that there is a basic constituency-MP representation bond which operates in Britain in addition to the representation bond formed between voters and parties.

Keywords: dyadic representation, Westminster, same-sex marriage, Euroscepticism, representation, legislative behaviour