Good Representation? Attribution and Practice

The analysis of representation is a particular challenge in a defect democracy with gendered institutions. The normative approach to representation is rooted in the democratic framework of representation but defect democracies in many ways work in “troubled” conditions. The aim of this paper is to develop an empirical model of representation based on how members of parliament conceptualize and perform their representative activity. The work is based on an ongoing survey research in the Hungarian Parliament exploring how MPs formulate their representative agenda, how they proceed with that agenda, how they build intra-parliamentary and extra-parliamentary networks in this process, which political instruments they tend to use and how they evaluate obstacles and opportunities in the parliamentary arena. The MPs self-evaluation is then compared to the performance of the MP in parliament, the representative outcome. We expect to find difference between attributions and outcome but even more importantly we expect that the richer the MP sees the representative process she/he will be positive in terms of self-evaluation, irrespective of the outcome.