Representing who? Patterns of behaviour of national and sub-national MPs in Italy

The relationship between elected representatives, parties and voters has been long debated, both at theoretical and empirical level, among party politics and elections scholars. The studies on the US Congress have underlined the strong attachment of the representatives to constituency service activities, which are considered essential for obtaining the re-election. Conversely, those on European MPs have shown that the latter consider the party as their “principal”, and not the voters. On the basis of the original quantitative dataset built by the PartiRep research group (www.partirep.eu), we will look at the relationship between representatives, parties and voters through the perceptions of a representative sample of surveyed regional and national MPs. The main research question of this paper concerns the explanatory factors of the variations in the behaviors of subnational and national MPs. To what extent subnational MPs are more oriented towards their constituency than national MPs? To what extent the territorial level of government contributes in explaining the variation in MPs behavior? The paper develops an explorative analysis of the relationship between representatives and parties, on the one hand, and between representatives and voters, on the other hand. We will consider as main explanatory variables the level of government, the geographical context, the ideological positioning and party affiliation. In particular, the dynamics of constituency service and of the relationship between the elected representatives and their electoral district will be analyzed within the framework of the literature on representative styles.