Paper Titles & Abstracts

Numerous studies on legislative behaviour have analysed why legislators choose to vote "Yea" or "Nay". However, a further option has so far been largely neglected: legislators can also choose not to decide and simply abstain from voting. This paper examines why legislators choose to explicitly vote "Abstain" whenever the rules of the legislature allow for such a vote choice. Is it because they shy away from taking sides when faced with competing demands? We address this question studying roll-call voting data from the 6th European Parliament, complemented with survey- and interview-evidence. We find that Members of the European Parliament are indeed prone to abstain when torn between different positions of their national party, their transnational group, and their country's minister.