What motivates good representatives? And the bad ones? How different actors and different factors shape the quality of political representation in a cross-national study of parliamentary questions on disability

Not all representation can be considered equal, so what motivates politicians to represent well? Group representation is motivated by more than membership of that group and while electoral motivations are well known, an increasing number of works show that representation is impacted by wider factors such as career history, personal networks etc. However, most studies focus on how motivational factors shape the propensity to represent rather than how they temper the substance of that representation. By bringing together scholarship on the quality of representation and factors motivating representation, this paper seeks to explain when and whether representation happens, but also how it happens – what shapes the existence, content, and quality of representation? Comparing three parliaments (New Zealand, Scotland, and the UK), this paper examines the factors motivating qualitatively different types of representation in relation to disability: what motivates the ‘good’ representative? What induces politicians to engage in ‘bad’ representation of disabled people? In doing so, this article explores linkages between descriptive and substantive representation. Analysis show that more ‘supportive’ forms of representation can be linked to intrinsic motivations, such as linked fate, the responsibility to represent, whereas more ‘restricted’ instances of representation tend to be motivated by extrinsic factors linked to electoral incentives, party rewards etc. Different factors tie representatives to the groups in question in different ways. Good representation emanates from moral and ideational ties, bad representation from more transactional ones. In other words, the variable quality of representation depends on what role the representative sees themselves having in relation to the group or issue in question.