Parliamentary roles in modern legislatures

This book gathers the most influential authors on role research and legislative studies to examine the different roles that MPs are playing in modern-day legislatures. It provides a comprehensive and critical overview of current research on legislative roles, summarises previous research, presents a large variety of methodological approaches and also explores the latest developing approaches to role theory.

The concept of political roles has become increasingly relevant for understanding contemporary political systems. Parliamentary, legislative and representative roles are professional roles that provide a way of connecting the individual legislator to their institution that can also explain a legislator’s attitude and behaviour. Drawing upon case studies with as much as 40 years of data that include Germany, the Netherlands, UK, Austria, Hungary, Australia, New Zealand and the European Parliament, this book examines the link between representative roles, different institutional settings and parliamentary behaviour. It argues that the roles MPs play depend of who they think they should represent; between their voters, their party, the people of their country and also themselves, conflicts of loyalty can occur. This book provides a framework to analyse MPs’ choices by searching both the reasons for their views about representation, and the consequences of those views in parliament.

Parliamentary Roles in Modern Legislatures will be of strong interest to students and scholars of government, legislative studies, political parties, comparative politics, political sociology and deliberative democracy.

Contents:

1. Introduction Magnus Blomgren & Olivier Rozenberg
2. Legislative Roles and Legislative studies – The neo-institutionalist turning point? Magnus Blomgren & Olivier Rozenberg
3. The Emergence and Transformation of Representative Roles Heinrich Best & Lars Vogel
4. The Consequences of Representatives’ Role Orientations: attitudes, behaviour, perceptions Rudy Andeweg
5. Roles as strategies: Towards a logic of legislative behavior Kaare Strøm
6. Legislators and their Representational Roles: Strategic Choices or Habits of the Heart? Thomas Zittel
7. Party Dimensions of Representation in Westminster Parliaments: Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom Anika Gauja
8. Parliamentary roles of MPs in sharp and soft focus: Interviews and behavioral record compared Marcelo Jenny & Wolfgang C. Müller
9. Role Stability in the context of institutional and positional change Gabriella Ilonszki
10. The cognitive rationality of role choices: evidences from the European Parliament Julien Navarro
11. Conclusion Oliver Rozenberg & Magnus Blomgren