How does diffuse support for the multilevel policy-making structure affect behaviour of subnational representatives?

The way elected politicians perceive their roles of representing different interests and how they behave in multilevel democracies are crucial for our understanding of representative democracy. Several studies explore the impact of differences in institutional settings on representatives’ behaviour, but the individual-level differences remain unexplored. The present paper asks the following questions: what type of representatives prioritize their constituency, and who are those who embrace the multilevel aspect of the policy-making structure? We argue that representatives’ preferences for self-rule –authority exercised by a government in its own jurisdiction– and shared rule –collaboration between national and subnational governments– affect the way they prioritize different interests in a multilevel context. We hypothesize that representatives’ who prefer self-rule are more likely to prioritize the interest of their constituents, whereas those who value shared rule are more likely to have contact with representatives from other tiers of government. We test our hypotheses using survey questions we developed, which were fielded in the Panel of Elected Representatives to over 1,200 local and regional politicians in Norway. Our results reveal that preferences for self-rule and shared rule play an important role in shaping representatives’ behaviour in a decentralized unitary country like Norway. These findings are important as they shed light into how diffuse support for the structure of multilevel government, measured by preferences for self-rule and shared rule, translate into specific behaviour and role perceptions of elected representatives.