The effect of legislative misalignment on representation of constituency interests
with Vardges Levonyan
We study how the correction of imperfect information in the legislature affects the representation of constituency interests. While belief updating ideally is expected to result in re-optimization by market actors, the effect on elite behaviour is less clear. This is because MPs pay a reputation cost when altering their policy stands, which could result in them abstaining from re-aligning with their districts when they receive new information about their constituencies’ preferences. Using a difference-in-differences setup and the Brexit referendum as a natural experiment that educates MPs about their constituencies’ leaning, we find that MPs who unexpectedly learn that they are misaligned with their districts (receive a negative information shock) avoid issues on which they are misaligned, relative to aligned MPs. Instead, they use more populist rhetoric, and push party ideology to obtain re-alignment. Our results show how legislators use populism and polarization as tools to avoid drawing attention to issues where there is a mismatch between voters and the legislature.
The causal effect of trust in government on green policymaking
Legislative party groups and party cohesion (book chapter)
with Martin Søyland
Norwegian Legislative Debates 1945–2022
with Jon Fiva
Speech is Silver, Silence is Gold: Trade-offs between local and collective representation
How does strong party discipline affect MPs’ willingness to represent local interests during times of distress? This paper uses parliamentary speeches from Norway together with unique data on parliamentary attendance and politicians’ travels to study how local economic hardship, proxied by unemployment, shapes legislators’ representational efforts in the national parliament. Contrary to what one would expect, I find that MPs deliver significantly fewer speeches and speak less about unemployment during local economic downturns. Using word embeddings together with recently developed methods to identify choices in high-dimensional data, I show that when MPs do speak about unemployment during times of distress, they deviate less from the party line. Deviations are favored by local voters but penalized financially by the party. These results demonstrate how it can be rational for party elites in well-functioning democracies to restrict MPs from representing subnational interests because they want to prevent deviations from the party line from compromising the party brand.
Group Identities and Parliamentary Debates (2023)
with Jon Fiva and Henning Øien, RR, Journal of Politics
How Does Party Discipline Affect Legislative Behavior? Evidence from Within-Term Variation in Lame-Duck Status (2024)
with Jon Fiva, Quarterly Journal of Political Science [Forthcoming]
Nedregård, O., & Abrahamsen, B. (2018). Frafall fra profesjonsutdanningene ved OsloMet. ISO 690
“Snakker mer om næringer de eier aksjer i”, Dagens Næringsliv (2023)
“Hyttepåske for hvem?”, NRK (2021)
“Må det en krise til før politikerne våkner?”, Aftenposten (2020)
“Amerikanske tilstander”, Dagsavisen (2019)
“Faglig interesserte studenter fullfører oftere utdanningen”, forskning.no (2018)