Do Dutch piliticions work?

This paper empirically studies the drivers of legislative effort in the Dutch context. The paper uses a novel, repeated cross-sectional dataset containing observations of Dutch Members of Parliament. An aggregate legislative effort index for Dutch politicians is created and two hypotheses are formulated. The first hypothesis states that politicians will work less as their party size increases. This is most likely due to a specialization effect. Secondly, politicians with lower cost of effort, i.e. politicians coming from a public-sector background, will exert more effort. This paper finds strongly significant evidence for the specialization effect. Weak evidence is found for the cost of effort hypothesis.