Strategic roll call vote requests in the German Bundestag 1

Eileen Böhringer2, Fang-Yi Chiou3, Simon Hug4, Bjørn Høyland5 

First version: July 2025, this preliminary version: Oct 19, 2025
Paper prepared for presentation at the
Annual Meeting of the Swiss Political Science Association
(Zürich, January 15-16, 2026)

Abstract

Data from roll call votes in parliaments offer a unique source on behavioral information on members of parliament. What this data can tell us, however, depends very much on the process that produced it, namely what led to a roll call vote. In many parliaments political parties are the main actors and they are likely engaged in a strategic game leading to interdependent choices. This interdependence has, however, largely been overlooked in the empirical literature on roll call votes. Drawing on data from the German Bundestag and an estimator for a statistical strategic model proposed by Chiou and Yang (2008) and extended by Chiou, Hug and Hoyland (2017) we show that German political parties make interdependent choices when requesting roll call votes. Our results also show that such requests follow different patterns among parties, a finding that previous work has largely neglected.

Footnotes:

1Helpful exchanges with Franziska Brand and Ulrich Sieberer as well as the financial support from the Research Council of Norway (Grant No. 120120) are gratefully acknowledged.
2  Département de science politique et relations internationales, Faculté des sciences de la société ; Université de Genève; 40 Bd du Pont d'Arve; 1211 Genève 4; Switzerland; email: eileen.boeringer@unige.ch
3  IPSAS, Academia Sinica, Taipei; email: fangyichiou@gmail.com
4  Département de science politique et relations internationales, Faculté des sciences de la société ; Université de Genève; 40 Bd du Pont d'Arve; 1211 Genève 4; Switzerland; phone +41 22 379 83 78; email: simon.hug@unige.ch
5  Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Postbox 1097, Blindern, 0317 Oslo Norway ; phone +4722858598 ; email: bjorn.hoyland@stv.uio.no

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