A Battle for Resources: Personal Parliamentary Assistants and Party Control

Allocation of resources for personal assistants is a means for Parliament to ensure the autonomy of elected members from their political parties. In this paper, we show that the efficiency of such policies depends on the degree of control parties hold over their members’ political careers. We argue that in party-centered electoral systems parties can redirect their members’ personal resources towards party ends while such considerations are of less importance in candidate-centered systems. We test these claims on the use of personal assistants among Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) over the five-year period between 2012 and 2017. MEPs hire assistants to work in their member state (“local” assistants) or in Parliament (“accredited” assistants) over the same budget. These assistants perform different tasks ranging from constituency services to policy advice. About half of all the MEPs are elected in closed-list PR ballots. The remainder is elected in candidate-centered systems. We draw on this variation to show that in cases where parties control MEPs’ career prospects, more resources are canalized out of Parliament towards the national level. We show that this recanalization varies over time and across parties according to the parties’ prioritization of the EU level and need for extra resources at the national level. In closed-list systems, we find that MEPs from parties which obtained a lower vote share in the last national election than in the election before tend to hire more local assistants. Moreover, MEPs from smaller and younger parties, parties without representation in the national parliament or which have never been in government tend to hire more local assistants than other MEPs. These findings do not hold in the more candidate-centered systems of the EU.