Shirk or Work? On How Legislators React to Monitoring

In 2014 the Swiss Upper House introduced an electronic voting system, which would make it easier to monitor the voting behavior of its legislators. In this system, individual decisions on specific exogenously defined vote types are published automatically, while all other votes are not publicly disclosed. The present paper uses this institutional change to determine, in a quasi-experimental setting, whether the monitoring of parliamentary voting influences legislators? incentives to participate in floor votes. In addition, video recordings of all sessions are used to determine pre- and post-reform attendance rates during secret votes.

Attendance rates increase once legislators are subject to monitoring. This result cannot be explained by anticipation effects of the reform, the introduction of an electronic voting system, or election cycles. Attendance rises more among legislators who depend more heavily on their political career (full-time politicians, those with few interest groups, and incumbents running for re-election) than among their peers with better outside career options. Moreover, when voting is monitored, legislators abstain less and vote more often in line with their party majority.