Political representation in European democracies is widely considered partisan and collectivist. This article, however, stresses that there is more to the representative process in European democracies than just its textbook version. It emphasizes the role of geographic representation as a complementary strategy in party‐dominated legislatures that is characterized by two distinct features. First, legislators employ distinct opportunities to participate in legislative contexts to signal attention to geographic constituents without disrupting party unity. Second, these activities are motivated by individual‐ and district‐level characteristics that supplement electoral‐system‐level sources of geographic representation. We empirically test and corroborate this argument for the German case on the basis of a content analysis of parliamentary questions in the 17th German Bundestag (2009–13). In this analysis, we show that higher levels of localness among legislators and higher levels of electoral volatility in districts result in increased geographic representation.

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Scholarly attention to the nature and extent of negative campaigning in nonmajoritarian multiparty systems is steadily growing. While prior studies have made commendable progress in outlining the conditions and consequences of negative campaigning, they have typically disregarded the complex interdependencies of multiactor communication environments. The present study focuses on network-structural determinants of negative campaigning. It does so by relying on unique data from the 2013 Austrian federal election and using exponential random graph models to investigate patterns of mediated negative campaigning. We find that—above and beyond common determinants of negative campaigning—indicators of network structure are important predictors of campaign communication. This suggests that network models are crucial for accurately representing campaign communication patterns in multiparty systems.

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Personalized campaign styles are of increasing importance in contemporary election campaigns at all levels of politics. Surprisingly, we know little about their implications for the behavior of successful candidates once they take public office. This paper aims to fill this gap in empirical and theoretical ways. It shows that campaign personalization results in legislative personalization. Legislators that ran personalized campaigns are found to be more likely to deviate in roll call votes and to take independent positions on the floor. These findings result from a novel dataset that matches survey evidence on candidates’ campaign styles in the 2009 German Federal Elections with the legislative behavior of successful candidates in the 17th German Bundestag (2009–2013). Combining data from the campaign and legislative arenas allows us to explore the wider consequences of campaign personalization.

Despite their crucial role for democratic decision-making, local elections receive little atten­tion from political science research . To overcome this shortcoming, the article analyses the Bavarian local elections of 2020 . Although the CSU remains the strongest party in the Free State, the Green Party was able to make considerable gains, especially in larger cities . How­ever, the Greens could not gain any grounds in mayoral elections, whereas CSU and SPD competed for the win . In most of the cases, the Social Democrats won the posts in city halls . In addition to detailing election results, this article addresses the ballot lists, the com­position of local councils, and coalition building at the local level . Overall, this contribu­tion provides a comprehensive account of the elections, which are characterized by their unique ballot system and, thus, have a special role in the political system of Germany .

Brexit has been the most important issue in British politics in recent years. Whereas extra-parliamentary actors dominated the run-up to the 2016 referendum, the issue moved back to Parliament after the vote. This paper analyses newspaper reporting on Brexit in major British outlets during the post-referendum phase from July 2017 to March 2019. We study the visibility of Members of Parliament to assess whether the debate was balanced between parties and individual MPs relative to their vote and seat share. We conduct an automated text analysis of 58,247 online and offline newspaper articles covering the ideological spectrum from left to right, and from pro-Brexit to anti-Brexit. Our main findings are: (1) Conservative politicians dominated the debate, and (2) organized pro-Brexit MP pressure groups such as 'Leave Means Leave' were disproportionally more visible. This means that reporting was biased towards Conservative MPs and within the Conservative Party towards supporters of a hard Brexit. These findings are remarkably stable across different types of newspapers. The results challenge previous analyses that found a higher degree of balance in reporting but corroborate recent studies on the tonality of Brexit reporting that found a pro-Brexit bias.