Private members’ bills (PMB) have been mostly studied through a government opposition perspective as a tool in the hands of minor opposition parties. These studies have also predominantly focused on majoritarian electoral systems because of the more apparent electoral connection for MP’s. Using data on PMBs from two legislative periods of the Estonian parliament (1999-2007) and descriptive discriminant analysis, this paper investigates if the personal vote notion explains why some members of parliament engage in sponsorship of PMBs more often than others. The fixed institutional setting allows testing the effect of a proportional electoral system that produces three distinct types of mandates, which all differ according to the share of the personal vote. In addition, the “pseudo-legislative” nature of PMBs sometimes referred to in literature, is studied by comparing the technical sophistication of the bills and legislative process in parliament between different mandate types. The results support the personal vote concept by showing that MPs for whom the personal reputation is more central than party reputation, are more active in sponsoring bills and scrutinizing these in the plenary. Labeling the bills pseudo-legislation is not supported by the data.
