State structure and political representation: Comparing the views of statewide and sub‐state legislators across 14 countries

Abstract

How the recent creation, re‐invention or reinforcement of regional levels of political decision making across Europe compounds political representation is one of the key issues of contemporary democratic government. Despite growing scholarly interest, the critical question as to whether the regional institutional setting has brought about distinct representational roles among sub‐state legislators has yet to be addressed. To advance research in this field, this study bridges the literature on multilevel politics and legislative studies that to date have developed in isolation. Using innovative survey data from 14 statewide and 56 regional legislatures across Europe, it provides the first comprehensive test of how the state structure affects a legislator's views on representation. The results highlight that, relative to legislators in unitary states and national legislators in multilevel states, legislators at the regional level are more constituency‐oriented. Moreover, this heightened responsiveness to constituents at the regional level is not offset by weaker collective representation operating through political parties. Beyond these findings’ immediate relevance to scholars of federalism/regionalisation and parliaments, they also speak to the wider normative debate about the quality of political representation and public policy.

The odd one out: The influence of ideological positioning on individual electoral success

“…Rather, they will need to win votes in other ways, for instance, by emphasizing more personal traits such as their political experience, locality, or ethnical background. Second, the results further support the conclusion of Van Holsteyn and Andeweg (2010) and André et al (2017a) that preferential votes are usually embedded in a party vote. We know that ideology plays, to some extent, a role in the consideration to vote for a party, but this study shows that it does not seem to influence preferential voting.…”

“…Candidates who are not fully congruent with the official party line may be punished by their party's electorate for not "staying on message" (Norris et al, 1999). Studies by Van Holsteyn and Andeweg (2010) in the Netherlands and by André et al (2017a) in Belgium demonstrate that for most citizens in these countries, the vote decision actually follows a two-stage process, where they first decide which party they vote for and only then decide whether to cast a preferential vote and for whom. Given that the preferential vote is thus strongly embedded in the party vote, voters may not appreciate it when a candidate does not follow this party line.…”

Representation in Wales: An empirical analysis of policy divisions between voters and candidates

“…Bengtsson Wass, 2011;Bowler, 2017;Carman, 2007;Doherty, 2013) or elites (e.g. André et al, 2016;Heitshusen et al, 2004;Önnudóttir, 2014;Rush, 2001), but do not compare these. Those that do, explore the effect of congruence on satisfaction with democracy and do not focus on the nature of congruence (André and Depauw, 2017) or reveal mixed insights.…”

Electoral systems and ideological voting

“…By examining how the intraparty dimension of electoral systems has an impact on ideological voting, we aim to bridge three strands of literature that have not been sufficiently connected in the past. First, we speak to the comparative electoral systems research that has mostly concentrated on the supply-side elements of non-ideological voting, such as candidates' attributes (Shugart et al, 2005;Dahlgaard, 2016) or legislators' style (Bowler and Farrell, 1993;Pilet et al, 2012;André et al, 2016). We turn our attention to the less explored demand side and focus on voters' reactions to these elements.…”