Political Representation: The Perspective of the Represented and the Representatives

I(What) does the role played by the individual MPs contribute to the citizens perceptions of feeling well represented in the political system and its core institutions and what is the impact of these perceptions and assessments on the citizens’ attitudes towards the political regime and the political institutions? So far, due to methodological problems and a lack of appropriate data, there exists only limited empirical evidence on the role of the representatives as a determinant of the political attitudes of the represented under varying systemic conditions. The purpose of the section is to integrate evidence on the process of representation in modern democracies found in different fields of research and using different methods of data collection: On the one hand, the focus will be on the citizens’ attitudes towards representation and individual as well as collective representatives as gathered by survey data. Papers should cover the questions how well citizens feel represented in the political system, by which agencies they feel more or less well represented, in what respects this turns out to be the case and what the determinants and the impact of these attitudes are. On the other hand, representation will be analysed as an activity of individual MPs in the context of their constituencies, i.e. the papers should cover issues such as the time budget of the representatives’ district work, patterns of interaction at the constituency level, perceptions of role of district work as part of the representatives’ political agenda.