MPs' Roles and Activities: Findings on Political Representation in Parliaments and How to Best Measure it

Abstract

Political representation is a key topic for nowadays democracy: Democracy could hardly exist if it was not conceived and developed as representative democracy. While some citizens seem to feel satisfied with the way political representation is conducted, many other criticise and contest the way their political linkage with the system is developed by their representatives. The seminal work by Wahlke, Eulau, Buchanan, and Ferguson (1959 and 1962) paved the way for a fruitful avenue for empirical studies on political representation and the ‘role theory’ or ‘role analysis’ in legislative studies. So far, though, there is not a common definition about how ‘role’ is to be understood and what is the best way to measure it, and what are the factors that best explain it/them: a) Roles as the expected behavioural patterns from MPs (Whalke et al., 1962), explained by demographic and ecological –social, economic and political traits of the country, region or constituency-, the specific recruitment process, personal patterns and character, and parliamentary socialization. b) Roles as profiles MPs could adopt due to different motives, such as MPs’ emotional or psychological incentives (preferences on MP’s activity), professional incentives (specific MP’s goals), her/his attitudes towards the representative process, and her/his behaviour as an MP (Searing, 1994). c) Roles as instrumental mechanism to achieve the incentives MPs may have (such as re-selection, re-election, a position in the party, the Legislature, or the Executive, or a future successful career in the private sector related with the activity developed as an MP) in a given institutional context (Strom, 1997, 2012). Or --in an attempt to find common ground-- d) roles as MPs’ attitudes, MPs’ behaviours, or a mixture of both of them (Blomgren and Rozenberg, 2012). Considering all those theoretical approaches, it makes sense to study to what extent roles can affect and explain MP´s behaviour, and what reciprocal relations can be observed between MPs’ roles and their behaviour (Andeweg, 2012). Various methodological or technical instruments were used to obtain the relevant information in research field: surveys, semi-structured interviews, participatory-observation, or a balanced combination of them all in a mix methods approach. The proposed panel will analyse substantive results and how to best measure different dimensions of representational roles and MPs’ activities –both from the role and the actual behaviour perspective--. The aim of the panel deals both with substantive results and the technics used to measure and achieve MPs’ roles and behaviour and activities (surveys and survey questions, in-depth interviews, observant participation, or other empirical evidence…). Both case study and comparative approaches will be welcome to the panel.