The Mandate Divide in Policy Representation: The Substantive Representation of Agricultural Interests in the Hungarian Parliament

Abstract

Policy responsiveness is considered an effective tool for representing the aggregated interests of an electoral district. This article asks the question whether or not legislators in a mixed-member electoral system act on the profile of the constituency in their parliamentary work and, if yes, whether the magnitude of their actions is dependent upon mandate type and electoral security. I answer these questions by using data on Hungarian Members of Parliament (MPs)’ parliamentary questions, and the agricultural profile of the constituencies between 1998 and 2010. It is found that a larger share of the agricultural population correlates with a greater frequency of agriculture questions. Furthermore, as expected, single-member district MPs are more vigilant to the share of the agricultural population than list MPs. Interestingly, MPs remain indifferent to the fierceness of competition: they ask just as any many questions in the case of a safe seat as in the case of stiff competition.

Personalised Representation in a Weak and Party-Controlled Legislature: Policy Responsiveness in the French Parliament

“…The burgeoning literature thus provides encouraging results. Although most of the European legislatures are party-centred (Thomassen and Andeweg, 2004), districtoriented policy responsiveness is a reality (Borghetto et al, 2020;Däubler, 2020;Papp, 2020). However, the literature also suffers from three significant gaps that our article aims to contribute to filling.…”

“…The very high variation in the results may be explained by the diversity of the cases and the heterogeneity of the indicators. Papp (2020) and Däubler (2020) have used standardised indicators with fixed measures (e.g. the number of farmers in a given place at a given time).…”

“…Theoretical Framework Eulau and Karps (1977) define policy responsiveness as the connection between the interests of constituents and the work of legislators. The literature acknowledges that the concept of interests is elusive and difficult to grasp (Borghetto et al, 2020;Papp, 2020). According to Papp (2020: 3), this is not only a matter of debate among scholars, but also an issue for MPs themselves.…”

“…The literature on policy responsiveness provides few clear-cut results. Whereas it is a crucial factor in certain publications (Ashworth and Bueno de Mesquita, 2008;Dropp and Peskowitz, 2012), it has no effect elsewhere (Papp, 2020). In weak legislatures, and in France in particular, it is argued that the work in parliament has only a limited impact on an MP's name recognition (Brouard et al, 2013;Costa and Kerrouche, 2009a).…”

“…Although policy responsiveness submit, and the use of this method is rather hassle-free. Finally, the literature widely uses them to study MPs' attention to the demands of constituents (Borghetto et al, 2020;Martin, 2011;Papp, 2020). We decided to focus on agriculture for three reasons.…”