The Richer, the Trustier? How Party Resources Affect Legislators’ Style of Representation

Theories of parliamentary party democracy usually expect party representatives to act uniformly and follow their party’s policies. However, the preferences of elected representatives may diverge from those of their party or voters, to which they are both accountable. In case of such disagreement, MPs may adopt different styles of representation (party-delegate, voter-delegate or trustee), depending on the principals they choose to primarily represent. While previous research has emphasized the role of institutional and individual factors on legislators’ style of representation, few studies have examined the role of extra-parliamentary party organization. Yet, the ‘party in public office’ does not operate as an isolated entity, but as one of the faces of a larger party organization. Extra-parliamentary organizational structures and characteristics should therefore impact MPs’ attitudes towards their party. This paper addresses this gap, by examining the influence of intra-party resources on legislators’ style of representation. The paper specifically tests the effect of the amount, the type (financial, members and staff) and the way resources are allocated. The availability of resources has often been studied in relation to the development of inter- and intra-organizational conflicts. Studies on factionalism have studied the link between intra-party divisions and resources available to internal factions (Boucek 2012; Ceron 2015), studies on party members have studied the link between resource dependency and internal organization (Kölln 2015) and legislative studies have considered parliamentary resources (e.g. staff, office spaces, etc.) as managerial and disciplinary tools used by the party leader or whip (Malloy 2003). Yet, we know very little on the extent to which extra-parliamentary resources may affect legislators’ style of representation. Better understanding the impact of party resources influx on legislators’ style of representation is crucial, as legislators’ representational roles may impact their actual behaviour as linkage agents, and may affect the quality of representative democracy. This issue appears particularly salient at a time when party organizations are in a continuous process of transformation through processes such as cartelization (Katz and Mair 1995, 2009) – a process that has been accompanied by increased resources for established parties, by a rising share of public subsidies in the parties’ income but also by a decline of party membership and a growing contestation of the alleged cartelized elites. Using quantitative data collected in the frame of comparative surveys of (elected) candidates and of the Political Party Database (PPDB), we test these relationships across parliamentary democracies. Among other results, we show that the stronger the party in terms of financial resources, the higher the probability for individual MPs to adopt a party-delegate style. Other findings point the relevance of party specificities and organizational features in shaping legislators’ style of representation.