Individualised Representation in Partisan Legislatures. Legislative Speech in the German Bundestag

Research on US Congress emphasizes the propensity of Congresspersons to represent geographic constituencies in individualized ways. In European legislatures this type of behavior is widely considered to be less likely due to electoral and party organizational constraints. However, recent comparative research highlights legislative activities such as parliamentary questions and vote explanations as means to combine partisanship with individualized representation in complex and subtle ways. This paper theorizes these new approaches to individualized representation and empirically applies this perspective to the German Bundestag. The German mixed system allows to particularly gauging the role of electoral incentives as a factor explaining individualized representation. Our analysis draws from newly collected qualitative interview based and quantitative text based data on the 17th German Bundestag. It aims to contribute both to debates on legislative behavior and the role of electoral systems and parties in this regard.