TY  - JOUR
A1  - Tuttnauer, Or
A1  - Wegmann, Simone
T1  - Voting for Votes
T2  - American political science review
N2  - Scholars frequently expect parties to act strategically in parliament, hoping to affect their electoral fortunes. Voters assumingly assess parties by their activity and vote accordingly. However, the retrospective voting literature looks mostly at the government's outcomes, leaving the opposition understudied. We argue that, for opposition parties, legislative voting constitutes an effective vote-seeking activity as a signaling tool of their attitude toward the government. We suggest that conflictual voting behavior affects voters through two mechanisms: as a signal of opposition valence and as means of ideological differentiation from the government. We present both aggregate- and individual-level analyses, leveraging a dataset of 169 party observations from 10 democracies and linking it to the CSES survey data of 27,371 respondents. The findings provide support for the existence of both mechanisms. Parliamentary conflict on legislative votes has a general positive effect on opposition parties' electoral performance, conditional on systemic and party-specific factors.
Y1  - 2022
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/62285
SN  - 0003-0554
SN  - 1537-5943
VL  - 116
IS  - 4
SP  - 1357
EP  - 1374
PB  - Cambridge Univ. Press
CY  - New York
ER  -