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National policy for local reasons: how MPs represent party and geographical constituency through initiatives on social security

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Abstract

In parliamentary systems of government, dyadic representation between MP and geographical constituency is considered to be of secondary importance and is typically understood as work related to particularised issues (e.g. constituency service, “pork” allocation and local matters). This paper argues that personal representation need not be particularistic. It may also come in the form of attention to national policy for local reasons, when issue salience varies across geographical constituencies due to the number of affected people or problem severity. The specific focus of the study lies on private members’ bills related to social security (pensions, unemployment, welfare). These three policies differ, among other things, in their alignment with class divisions and their link to the economic left–right dimension. They therefore allow for studying how both the party constituency and the geographical constituency shape MPs’ legislative work. The article develops specific predictions regarding how left–right position, electoral support among the affected group, and district-level recipient numbers affect legislative activity in the three policy fields. The empirical analysis uses data from Belgium (1999–2007). The results suggest that Belgian MPs represent party and geographical constituency in the case of pensions and unemployment benefits, but not in the same way as when it comes to social welfare.

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Notes

  1. Throughout the paper, I use the terms geographical constituency and (electoral) district interchangeably.

  2. Another strand of the literature considers parliamentary questions as instrument of inter-party competition to set the agenda (e.g. Green-Pedersen 2010; Vliegenthart et al. 2011). This perspective regards parties as the relevant (collective) actors, and does not give any special consideration to individual MPs.

  3. Another arena for dyadic representation of a non-local kind may be provided by speeches on the parliamentary floor (e.g. Baumann 2016; Bäck et al. 2014).

  4. My reasoning shares similarities with recent work by Jusko (2017), who argues and shows that (district-level) pivotality of low-income voters to electoral outcomes affects policies tackling poverty.

  5. In the period between 1999 and 2007, the observed range was between 47.9 and 52.0%, see https://doi.org/10.1787/socx-data-en.

  6. Own analysis of European Election Studies data. Most mentioned problems refer to unemployment.

  7. It has been argued that the reorganisation of districts has also changed the nature of constituency representation (de Winter and Baudewyns 2015). The correlations between the measures of local salience calculated for the two different sets of districts are very high, though.

  8. There are informal constraints to bill initiation, since MPs usually have to ask the party leadership for permission, and MPs from government parties also must not challenge the coalition agreement (de Winter and Dumont 2006).

  9. Considered are the “Committee for Social Affairs”, the “Committee for Finances and the Budget”, the “Committee for Economy, Science, Education, Scientific and Cultural National Institutions, Middle Classes and Agriculture” and the “Committee for Public Health, Environment and Societal Renewal”.

  10. Respective information comes from the official biographies on the website of the Belgian parliament.

  11. The party–district combinations are based on the geographically larger electoral districts from the 51st legislative period, since legislature-specific party–district combinations would be crossed with the MP-level random effects. Such crossing is not possible for cluster-robust standard errors, and estimation proved difficult with a second set of party-district random effects. Note that standard errors tend to be smaller and all constituency-related variables remain statistically significant when using standard errors clustered at the district-level, see Online Appendix G.

  12. Checks indicate that the expected share of zero counts under the model closely matches the observed rate.

  13. MPs with very short stays in parliament (less than 50 days) are not considered in the analysis.

  14. Compare also Kam (2009) for a critique of this view in relation to dissent in voting.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank several Members of the Belgian Chamber of Representatives for their participation in interviews, Nathalie Brack for help with conducting these, Korinna Veller and Timur Koroliuk for research assistance, and Chris Brijs from Banque Carrefour de la Sécurité Sociale for advice concerning the benefit recipient data. I am also grateful to many people who commented on earlier versions. All errors are mine. This research was supported by the Belgian Science Policy (Belspo)-funded PartiRep project.

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    Thomas Däubler

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Däubler, T. National policy for local reasons: how MPs represent party and geographical constituency through initiatives on social security. Acta Polit 55, 472–491 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-018-0125-x

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