1 Introduction
Political competition affects the behavior of politicians and their legislative activities (e.g., Bernecker,
2014; Gavoille & Verschelde,
2017). Voters usually benefit as political competition increases because competition extends their opportunities to punish politicians for legislative shirking, that is, for neglecting their parliamentary duties. We investigate how the existence of
elected competitors from the same constituency, but from different parties in the German federal parliament, affects legislative shirking. The German national electoral system institutionally guarantees that the number of elected legislators per constituency varies from one to five: At least one legislator, who faces zero to four competitors, always represents a constituency. To establish a causal impact of elected competitors, we exploit changes in the number of competitors from legislators leaving parliament during the legislative period within an instrumental variables setting. Our approach allows us to explore the effect of more vigorous political competition when constituents can compare the behavior of already elected legislators directly.
Political competition is argued to increase citizens’ welfare, enhance the efficiency of decision-making, improve the quality of political outcomes, and reduce rent extraction efforts (e.g., Padovano & Ricciuti,
2009; Stigler,
1972). Empirically, political competition has been shown to affect economic development (Besley et al.
2010; Padovano & Ricciuti,
2009), public spending (Rogers & Rogers,
2000; Padovono & Ricciuti,
2009; Aidt & Eterovic,
2011), public debt (Skilling & Zeckhauser,
2002), tax revenues (Yogo & Njib,
2018), and government efficiency (Ashworth et al.
2014; Sørensen,
2014). It influences the policy decisions of governments (Besley & Preston,
2007; Besley et al.
2010; Bracco et al.
2019) and increases the supply of politically provided public goods (Arvate,
2013). The lack of political competition has been linked to diverse forms of favoritism (Solé-Ollé & Viladecans-Marsal,
2012; Curto-Grau et al.
2018; Lévêque,
2020), a less independent judiciary (Hanssen,
2004), and the concentration of power (Dal Bó et al.
2009).
At the individual legislator level, being exposed to more electoral competition relates to more active legislative processes (Gavoille,
2018; Gavoille & Verschelde,
2017), less outside income (Becker et al.
2009), less rent extraction (Ferraz & Finan,
2011; Kauder & Potrafke,
2016), and it influences legislators’ voting behavior (Kauder & Potrafke,
2019). Competition seems to foster a higher quality of politicians, measured either by education, previous employment in high-skilled occupations, political experience, cognitive and leadership abilities, or even facial competence (Atkinson et al.
2009; De Paola & Scoppa,
2011; Galasso & Nannicini,
2011; Dal Bó et al.
2017). It has been linked to absentee rates in roll-call votes (Galasso & Nannicini,
2011 and Bernecker,
2014 find less frequent absences as competition increases, while Besley & Larcinese,
2011 and Willumsen,
2019 find no effect). Electoral competition usually is measured by winning vote margins or the number of (effective) candidates who run for office. Our contribution introduces a novel and alternative measure of competition and analyzes its effects on legislative activity and the behavior of individual legislators.
The existence of elected competitors from the same constituency but different parties in parliament largely has remained a neglected aspect of electioneering, subsequent legislative competition, and the activities of individual legislators. If more than one legislator is elected per constituency, voters can compare more easily the activity and the qualities of these legislators. Thus, elected competitors from the same constituency can directly be benchmarked against one another. They are active in the identical political environment and for the same constituents. Such a benchmark for evaluating a legislator’s behavior, activity and performance in parliament may allow voters to make more informed decisions. Electoral competition may amplify legislative competition and affect the behavior of legislators. Politicians have been shown to be more accountable in elections and they are punished for poor performance when voters are provided with more reliable information that may allow for benchmarking (e.g., Ferraz & Finan,
2008; Banerjee et al.
2011). That effect, in turn, changes the incentives of legislators to take account of their constituents’ interests and increases legislative competition within parliament, that is, legislators may better fulfill their legislative duties and shirking is reduced (e.g., Bernecker,
2014; Gavoille & Verschelde,
2017). Hence, we expect that competition from other elected legislators from the same constituency makes legislative shirking more costly and less appealing.
The informative institutional setting at the German federal level allows us to analyze the effect of having one or more elected competitors from the same constituency on legislative shirking in parliament. The German electoral system combines elements of plurality voting with proportional representation in a mixed electoral system: one-half of all legislators is elected in a local constituency by the plurality rule, while the other half is elected from a party list at the state level by proportional rule. Candidates running for a direct mandate in constituencies typically appear on a party list, that is, they can enter parliament as direct candidates or through the party list (e.g., Frank & Stadelmann,
2021). Defeated candidates from the direct election in the constituencies may still win mandates through the party lists if they rank high enough on their respective party list. Consequently, the overall number of elected legislators per constituency can be more than one: next to the directly elected legislator, one or more legislators may be elected through the party lists such that more legislators per constituency enter the federal parliament. In most cases, more than one legislator represents a constituency, that is, competitors are elected and benchmarking is possible.
1
For our empirical analysis, we rely on data from German legislators in the federal parliament for the legislative periods from 1953 to 2017. As commonly is done in the literature, we use absentee rates in roll-call votes as a dependent variable to measure legislative shirking (e.g., Gagliarducci et al.
2010; Besley & Larcinese,
2011; Bernecker,
2014). Our results show that facing competition from elected legislators from the same constituency correlates negatively with the absentee rates of individual politicians. The result holds when controlling for a large set of covariates. We also account for legislator fixed effects such that the same individual legislators are compared when and when not facing elected competitors over different legislative periods.
While legislator fixed effects go some way toward address endogeneity issues, unobservable variables such as political ability or valence could be time-variant. To address such issues, we rely on credibly exogenous variation in the number of legislators per constituency in an instrumental variables setting: During a given legislative period, legislators may end their mandates and leave parliament for reasons such as death, sickness or running for higher political offices. Vacant mandates are allocated in Germany
without another election to the next candidate from the closed state party list who has not yet been elected to federal parliament. Therefore, legislators who leave parliament bring about changes in the number of competitors in
two constituencies simultaneously: in the constituency they originally served, and in the constituency where a replacement candidate takes office.
2 Thus, we can generate two instrumental variables that credibly are exogenous to competition from
other legislators from the two constituencies concerned, thus allowing us to estimate the causal effect of political competition and elected competitors.
Employing our instrumental variables, we find that the existence of an elected competitor from the same constituency leads to a statistically significant reduction of 6.1 percentage points in the roll-call-vote absentee rate. The effect is quantitatively substantial and represents about 49% of the mean absentee rate in our sample. It is robust to the inclusion of other indicators of political competition, that is, our measure of competition captures additional aspects of electoral competition and benchmarking in comparison to what is reflected by, for example, vote margins. Subsample regressions and alternative specifications of the dependent variable capturing legislative shirking also yield robust results.
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: Sect.
2 describes the institutional setting and our data. Section
3 presents the identification strategy. Estimation results, robustness checks, and mechanisms are presented in Sect.
4. Section
5 summarizes our results and offers our conclusions.
4 Results
4.1 Fixed effects regressions: The link between elected competitors and absentee rates
Table
1 shows the link between
Elected competitors in constituency and
Absentee rate in roll-call votes accounting for mandate type, being a member of the government party, age, tenure, being a minister as well as individual legislator and time fixed effects in an OLS fixed-effects setting as specified in Eq. (
1).
Table 1
The effect of elected competitors in constituency on the absentee rate in roll-call votes (OLS fixed effects)
Elected competitors in constituency | −0.00996** | −0.00903** | −0.00894* | −0.00784* |
(0.00457) | (0.00458) | (0.00459) | (0.00456) |
Direct mandate | −0.0116* | −0.0102* | −0.0139** | −0.0122** |
(0.00608) | (0.00605) | (0.00610) | (0.00605) |
Government party | −0.0401*** | −0.0404*** | −0.0481*** | −0.0490*** |
(0.00367) | (0.00375) | (0.00376) | (0.00383) |
Age | 0.00353 | 0.00387 | 0.00655 | 0.00642 |
(0.00699) | (0.00697) | (0.00729) | (0.00725) |
Age2 | −0.00001 | −0.00003 | −0.00002 | −0.00003 |
(0.00002) | (0.00002) | (0.00002) | (0.00002) |
Tenure | 0.0402*** | 0.0460*** | 0.0384*** | 0.0451*** |
(0.0137) | (0.0135) | (0.0139) | (0.0137) |
Minister | 0.0982*** | 0.0920*** | 0.106*** | 0.0988*** |
(0.0139) | (0.0140) | (0.0138) | (0.0138) |
Political position controls | No | Yes | No | Yes |
Legislator fixed effects | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Legislative period fixed effects | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Observations | 8734 | 8734 | 8734 | 8734 |
Number of legislators | 3006 | 3006 | 3006 | 3006 |
R-squared | 0.255 | 0.262 | 0.337 | 0.347 |
Specification (1) suggests that being a legislator who faces elected competitors from the same constituency is associated with a statistically significant lower absentee rate. Quantitatively, being a legislator who faces elected competitors reduces absentee rates by about 1.0 percentage point. The signs of the other covariates are mostly as expected. Being a directly elected legislator reduces absentee rates (Gagliarducci et al.
2011), members of the parties in government miss parliamentary sessions less often, being a minister increases absentee rates, legislators tend to be absent more often the longer they are members of the parliament (
Tenure), and age itself is statistically insignificant. In specification (2), we enter additional covariates into our regression to control for more political positions.
Elected competitors in constituency remains negatively related to
Absentee rate in roll-call votes.
17
Several roll-call votes may take place in the same parliamentary session. When creating our dependent variable Absentee rate in roll-call votes, it makes no difference whether a legislator misses, for example, five roll-call votes on the same day or five votes on days each with a single roll-call vote. We enter the share of days that legislators are absent at least once as an alternative dependent variable in columns (3) and (4) to account for frequent roll-call votes on the same day. The link between Elected competitors in constituency and Share of days absent is comparable to the results using Absentee rate in roll-call votes as the dependent variable. If legislators face other elected competitors in their constituency, the share of days that they are absent from parliament is statistically lower.
4.2 Instrumental variables: The effect of elected competitors on absentee rates
We report the 2SLS regression results in Table
2. We enter
Early dropout in constituency and
Replacement in constituency as instruments for
Elected competitors in constituency.
Table 2
The effect of elected competitors in constituency on the absentee rate in roll-call votes (2SLS)
Panel (a): Second stage results |
Elected competitors in constituency | −0.142*** | −0.0613*** | −0.0614*** | −0.149*** | −0.0576** | −0.0577** |
(0.0329) | (0.0233) | (0.0234) | (0.0337) | (0.0226) | (0.0226) |
Panel (b): First stage results for instruments only |
Early dropout in constituency | −0.290*** | −0.367*** | −0.367*** | −0.290*** | −0.367*** | −0.367*** |
(0.0283) | (0.0315) | (0.0315) | (0.0283) | (0.0315) | (0.0315) |
Replacement in constituency | 0.164*** | 0.122*** | 0.123*** | 0.164*** | 0.122*** | 0.123*** |
(0.00609) | (0.0145) | (0.0144) | (0.00609) | (0.0145) | (0.0144) |
Controls (for all panels) |
Personal controls | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
Political position controls | No | No | Yes | No | No | Yes |
Legislator fixed effects | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
Legislative period fixed effects | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
Observations | 8734 | 8734 | 8734 | 8734 | 8734 | 8734 |
Number of legislators | 3006 | 3006 | 3006 | 3006 | 3006 | 3006 |
F-statistic first stage | 432.4 | 102.1 | 102.3 | 432.4 | 102.1 | 102.3 |
Hansen J-statistic (p-val.) | 0.134 | 0.756 | 0.688 | 0.108 | 0.700 | 0.636 |
The first stage results in all columns of panel (b) indicate that our instruments correlate strongly with Elected competitors in constituency. As expected, the variable Early dropout in constituency affects competition negatively, while the variable Replacement in constituency affects competition positively. F-statistics for the excluded instruments indicate that the instruments are not weak. The first-stage results underscore the relevance of our instruments in explaining political competition from other elected legislators, as could be expected given the institutional setting.
We explore a parsimonious 2SLS specification without controls in column (1) of panel (a). The coefficient of
Elected competitors in constituency is statistically significant and negative. Adding personal time-variant covariates, legislator fixed effects, and legislative period fixed effects in column (2) as well as additional political positions controls in column (3), we find that the statistically significant and negative effect persists but becomes smaller in magnitude. The existence of elected competitors from the same constituency, which owes to dropouts or replacements, leads to a reduction in the absentee rate by about 6.1 percentage points, which is larger than the OLS results of Table
1, as expected.
18 That effect is quantitatively substantial and corresponds to about 49% of the average absentee rate in roll-call votes (12.5%). Thus, competition from other elected legislators in the same constituency explains about half of the average absentee rate. Hansen’s J-statistic and respective p-values, as reported in Table
2, corroborate the argument that the instruments are uncorrelated with the error term and suggest that the instruments are econometrically valid.
The IV results are qualitatively and quantitatively similar when using the
Share of days absent as the dependent variable in columns (4)-(6). Dropouts and replacements affect electoral competition (first stage), and competition from elected competitors negatively affects legislators’ absentee rates.
19 Overall, the 2SLS results point to a substantial effect of having elected competitors from the same constituency, which is revealed in actual parliamentary behavior. As hypothesized and consistent with theory, voters could be able to evaluate legislators’ representation efforts better and may make more informed decisions in elections once benchmarking becomes easier. Shirking therefore is more costly for legislators when they can be compared effectively to competitors who are active in the same political environment, that is, in the same constituency. Direct electoral competition may thus drive legislative competition in parliament which affects parliamentary activity.
4.3 Robustness checks and refinements
Table
3 reports a series of robustness checks.
20 We continue to employ our instrumental variables strategy. Next to the existence of elected competitors from the same constituency, other aspects of political competition like the closeness of elections or the number candidates who run for a direct election in the constituency might be important to explain legislative shirking. In particular, candidates in contested constituencies might receive higher positions on state party lists as a reward or to secure their election. Constituencies that are competitive for reasons other than the number of elected legislators might end up with several representatives. Thus, further exploration considering alternative dimensions of political competition becomes relevant.
Table 3
Robustness checks for the effect of elected competitors in constituency on the absentee rate in roll-call votes controlling for alternative measures of political competition
Elected competitors in constituency | −0.0605*** | −0.0608*** | −0.0604*** | −0.0622*** | −0.0773*** | −0.0702** |
(0.0232) | (0.0233) | (0.0230) | (0.0235) | (0.0281) | (0.0289) |
Vote margin | −0.0234 | | | | | |
(0.0263) | | | | | |
Vote margin2 | 0.00333 | | | | | |
(0.0561) | | | | | |
Closeness constituency | | −0.00603 | | | | |
| (0.0248) | | | | |
Direct candidates | | −0.00140 | | | | |
| (0.00119) | | | | |
Last term | | | 0.0296*** | | | |
| | (0.00444) | | | |
Parl. group size | | | −0.000296*** | | | |
| | (0.00007) | | | |
Personal controls | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
State*Seat gov. controls | No | No | No | Yes | No | No |
Legislator fixed effects | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Legislative period fixed effects | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Observations | 8734 | 8734 | 8734 | 8734 | 7767 | 6482 |
Number of legislators | 3006 | 3006 | 3006 | 3006 | 2944 | 2662 |
F-statistic first stage | 104.1 | 103.3 | 101.9 | 100.8 | 71.57 | 48.17 |
Hansen J-statistic (p-val.) | 0.736 | 0.780 | 0.757 | 0.809 | 0.482 | 0.424 |
We investigate whether the effect of
Elected competitors in constituency is independent of commonly used measures of political competition in our Table
3 regressions. In column (1), we enter vote margins following, for example, Galasso and Nannicini (
2011). Vote margins are positive for legislators with direct mandates (margins over runner-up in direct elections) and negative for legislators from the party list (difference to winner of the direct mandate).
We suspect that the effect of vote margins is non-linear and largest when legislators are either closely elected or not elected. Hence, we also enter the squared vote margin. The effect of Elected competitors in constituency remains unchanged, that is, statistically significant, negative and with an absolute size corresponding to about 6.1 percentage points.
In column (2), we include two further measures of political competition: Closeness constituency is the difference in the vote shares of the first and second candidate in the direct election, allowing us to consider the direct mandate contest within a constituency. We expect direct elections to be more competitive when voters can choose amongst more alternatives and therefore enter the number of Direct candidates, which is the sum of all candidates running for direct election in the constituency. The effect of Elected competitors in constituency remains statistically significant, negative, and of the same size as before. The other measures of political competition have the expected signs, but they are statistically insignificant.
Legislators have been found to be absent more often in their last term when reelection incentives no longer have any disciplining effect (Lott,
1987; Rothenberg & Sanders,
2000; Besley & Larcinese,
2011; Willumsen & Goetz,
2017). Results from column (3) confirm that finding and indicate that, in their last terms, legislators’ absentee rates are about 3.0 percentage points higher. The size of the parliamentary faction has a negative impact, too.
In column (4), we take the distance of the legislators’ state to the seat of government into account (see, e.g., Willumsen,
2019). Distance is related to travel time, which may affect absentee rates. We exploit the change in the seat of government from Bonn to Berlin in 1999 to account for distance and interact state dummies with a variable indicating whether the seat of parliament is in Berlin or not. The effect of the existence of elected competitors in the same constituency is unaffected by the inclusion of those additional controls: its effect remains negative at about 6.2 percentage points.
The number of roll-call votes in which legislators are theoretically able to participate varies over legislative periods. The relative salience of a single roll-call vote in legislative periods with only a few votes might make it more costly for legislators to miss. To test whether our results are driven by periods with small numbers of roll-call votes, we drop observations from legislators who were able to (theoretically) participate only in fewer than 30 or 50 recorded votes in columns (5) and (6), respectively. If anything, the point estimates for Elected competitors in constituency increase slightly in absolute terms in those subsamples. The effect always remains negative and statistically significant.
Tables A2–A4 in the Online Appendix show a large array of additional robustness checks and offers further discussions. In Table A2, we account for the fact that up to five representatives can be elected from one constituency and replace the binary measure of competition with the number of elected competitors. In Table A3, we concentrate on different samples to test for the robustness of our main results, thereby taking account of different incentives regarding participation in roll-call votes. Table A4 explores more nuanced measures of Absentee rate in roll-call votes, by analyzing excused and unexcused absences separately, votes versus days or legislative shirking in the first versus the second half of the legislative period. All robustness tests support our main interpretation: Elected competitors from the same constituency affect the legislative activity by reducing legislative shirking.
To investigate the effect of elected competitors on legislative shirking further and to explore additional implications of its theoretical underpinning, we conduct an analysis for subgroups of legislators in Table
4.
Table 4
Further investigating the effect of elected competitors in constituency on the absentee rate in roll-call votes
Elected competitors in constituency | − 0.0467** | − 0.450 | − 0.0644* | − 0.0525* | − 0.0695** | − 0.0643 | − 0.0530** | − 0.0355 | − 0.0154* |
(0.0221) | (0.310) | (0.0330) | (0.0301) | (0.0283) | (0.0511) | (0.0242) | (0.0328) | (0.00916) |
Personal controls | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Legislator fixed effects | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Legislative period fixed effects | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Observations | 7250 | 1484 | 4516 | 4218 | 4167 | 4567 | 6239 | 3875 | 8731 |
Number of legislators | 2339 | 684 | 1649 | 1821 | 1742 | 2015 | 2467 | 2034 | 3006 |
F-statistic first stage | 105.5 | 2.580 | 63.82 | 43.73 | 64.14 | 24.16 | 91.28 | 48.95 | 102 |
Hansen J-statistic (p-value) | 0.393 | 0.693 | 0.622 | 0.747 | 0.989 | 0.895 | 0.185 | 0.867 | 0.882 |
Legislators from the large parties (Christian conservatives, CDU/CSU, and the social democrats, SPD) normally compete for direct constituency mandates, while legislators from smaller parties have little chance to win such mandates. For politicians from smaller parties, it is more important to have promising positions on the party list. Consequently, the existence of elected competitors is expected to influence the legislative behavior of politicians from large parties more strongly. In columns (1) and (2), we estimate regressions for subsamples of legislators from larger and smaller parties. As expected, we find a negative and statistically significant effect of
Elected competitors in constituency on
Absentee rate in roll-call votes for legislators from larger parties. The effect is not statistically significant for legislators from small parties.
21 If we replaced
Elected competitors in constituency with the number of competitors to allow for more variation in the competition variable, we would obtain a negative and statistically significant effect of having elected competitors even for small parties.
Columns (3) and (4) differentiate between legislators who are elected directly in the constituencies and those gaining seats from the closed state party list. For both groups, we find a negative effect that is statistically significant and quantitatively comparable to our main results. No evidence is found that the effect of elected competitors from the same constituency is restricted to legislators elected in the plurality voting tier. One potential explanation why the existence of elected competitors and benchmarking possibilities are relevant for legislators elected in the proportional tier is that they usually run again as a direct candidate in the constituency so that their performance relative to the legislator with the direct mandate matters. Even if legislators have small chances of winning in the constituency because they are from smaller parties, parties usually profit from strong candidates in the constituencies because they improve their second vote shares. Finally, as stated above, legislators who are comparatively successful in direct elections might also be rewarded in the conferences of state delegates with higher positions on the party list.
Column (5) shows that the effect of political competition is negative and statistically significant when legislators win or lose within a 15 percentage point margin, that is, when the direct election is comparatively close. On the other hand, if winners are elected safely (e.g., by more than a 15 percentage point margin) and the losers care more about their positions on the party list, we would expect that having more elected competitors might be less relevant for winners and losers (corresponding to the results of column 6). Thus, (expected) vote margins can moderate the effect of elected competitors on absentee rates.
Having elected competitors from the same constituency may matter more when they contest the direct mandate in the next election. In column (7), we drop all observations of legislators having two or more elected competitors. In column (8), observations of legislators with exactly one elected competitor are omitted. A larger number of competitors from the same constituency increases the likelihood that the additional legislators are candidates from smaller parties who lose the direct election with a large difference in first votes. They represent a smaller electoral threat to those competing for the direct mandate. The point estimates in column (7) are negative and statistically significant. In column (8), the point estimates are negative, somewhat smaller than column (7), and statistically insignificant, as expected.
Next to absentee rates, the roll-call vote data allow us to study deviations from the party line. The deviation rate is the number of times a legislator votes against his/her party majority divided by the number of roll-call votes in which he/she participates.
22 Party discipline is strongly enforced in Germany, and the mean deviation rate in our sample is only 2.5%. Interestingly, however, column (9) shows that legislators having elected competitors from the same constituency deviate less often from the party line. Having elected competitors from the same constituency reduces the deviation rate by 1.5 percentage points in our 2SLS estimations, which is substantial given the high levels of party discipline. More elected competitors at the constituency level seem to make the fallback party list option and hence voting with the party line more relevant owing to the German electoral system.
5 Conclusion
We analyze the effect of political competition on legislative shirking in roll-call votes using data from the German Bundestag from 1953 to 2017. We leverage the German mixed electoral system, which institutionally leads to differences in the number of elected legislators from the same constituency but representing different parties. Having more elected legislators from the same constituency is relevant because it allows voters to evaluate their representatives’ efforts and to compare them with each other under the same circumstances. Exogenous variation in the number of competitors per constituency is established by accounting for legislators who leave parliament during the legislative period and their respective replacement candidates as instruments. That empirical strategy allows us to identify the effect of political competition induced by elected competitors on legislative shirking in an instrumental variables setting.
We find that legislators who face elected competitors from the same constituency reduce their absentee rates by about 6.1 percentage points. The effect is substantial and corresponds to nearly 49% of the mean absentee rate. The effect of elected competitors is robust to the inclusion of individual fixed effects and other covariates found to be relevant predictors of legislative shirking. The effect also is independent of other measures of political competition commonly used in the literature. Our result suggests that, apart from the relevance of political competition for legislative shirking, elected competitors from the same constituency might be seen as a heretofore neglected aspect of political competition.
Evidence from our regression analysis indicates that our measure of political competition also impacts deviation from the party line in roll-call votes in addition to its effect on absentee rates. Future research may investigate the congruence of deviation from party lines induced by political competition. Such research might explore the effect of political competition on other legislative behavior, including the number of speeches, interpellations, and social media activity. Because mixed electoral systems are becoming more and more prevalent in different countries, our measure of competition and our empirical strategy may be applied elsewhere.
The possibility of contrasting legislators who represent the same geographic constituency in the same general political environment is not limited to mixed electoral systems. Thus, the disciplining function of elected competitors likewise could take effect in other contexts, for example, in pure proportional systems. Even in pure majoritarian systems, voters might compare the performances of elected legislators to some degree although they typically do not compete directly against one another at the same time. However, it could be expected that US Senators, for instance, are benchmarked by voters against one another. Similarly, usually two Councils of States are elected in Swiss cantons at the same time and voters hold two votes such that they may also be compared in parliament.
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