Political parties and style of representation:

(Maiden name: The input of politcians’ role-orientation: Representatives, parties and political systems)

This is a work in process, please do not cite without the author’s permission

Eva Heida Onnudottir

PhD student, political science

CDSS, Mannheim University

Email: eonnudot@mail.uni-mannheim.de

Paper presented in the panel “Roles of representation - a comparative approach “ at the 7th

ECPR General Conference Bordeaux, Domaine Universitaire, 4-7 September

Abstract

This paper focuses on how party characteristics explain styles of representation emphasised

within parties. Style of representation is measured at the party level as the proportion of

representatives within parties who are trustees, partisans or delegates. Based on the assumption

that the main difference between those three styles is the source used for decision making, where

trustees use their own judgment as a source, partisans the party policy and delegates the voters, it

is reasonable to assume that there are partly different incentives for each style. My findings

support that one of the main explanatory factor for the proportion of trustees within parties is

how often parties have been represented in government. For the proportion of partisans the

parties’ leadership control over nomination and the socialization effect of parties seems to

matter. For delegates I show that the higher the proportion of party identifiers among party

voters, the higher is the proportion of delegates within parties.

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Introduction

The main objective of this paper is to establish how party characteristics explain a difference in

emphasis on style of representation within parties. Style of representation is divided into the

proportion of representatives within each party who are trustees, partisans or delegates. The main

explanatory factors the proportion of candidates who are nominated by the parties’ leaderships,

the proportion of representatives who have background as locally and/or regionally elected

representatives, how often parties have been represented in government and the proportion of

party identifiers among its voters. In this paper I use the term “representatives” interchangeably

with “candidates”, referring to both actual and potential representatives for their respective party.

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in studying both the input and output of

style of representation (Blomgren and Rozenberg 2012). Input refers to what explains style of

representation and output what the consequences of it are. There is a growing consensus among

scholars that the Responsible Party Model (RPM) that has heavily influenced studies of

representation is too simplistic (see for example Bengtsson and Wass 2011, Wessels and Giebler

2011, Valen and Narud 2007). RPM assumes that parties’ policies are the main factor

contributing to the representational bond between the represented and parties (APSA 1950),

leaving no or little room for individual representatives or voters to shape or contribute to this

bond. One of the requirements of RPM to be effective is that representatives of the party should

follow the party policy – or in other words, they should preferably all be partisans for

representation to work. This contradicts the classical notion, originally used to explain

representation in the US, dividing representatives into trustees and delegates, where trustees use

their own judgement to take decisions while delegates supposedly follow the voters’ opinion

regardless of their own stand on issues (see for example Eulau et al. 1959). Examining

representation in France, Converse and Pierce (1986) add the partisan role to the trustee versus

delegate typology, claiming that this threefold classification is closer to capturing the practice or

reality of political representation. While the trustee versus delegate role might be appropriate

explaining style of representation in the US, those two are not sufficient when explaining

representation in Europe where parties play a bigger role in politics compared to the US. In a

recent publication Rozenberg and Blomgren (2012) argue that a threefold classification into

trustees, partisans and delegates is linked to both a normative debate on representation as well as

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a philosophical one, with the major question being how elected representatives should make

decisions in modern democracies. This threefold classification is more realistic than both the

requirement of RPM assuming that all representatives should be partisans and the too simple

twofold classification into trustees and delegates. Those three different roles reflect different

sources representatives use, or claim to use, to take decisions in their work as representatives –

specifically when there are conflicting opinions.

The core of political representation is that there is a relational element between those who

are represented and representatives (Castiglione and Warren 2006). This relation is marked with

ambiguities and one could say that the political use of the term political representation has

further added to its ambiguity. Defining the relationship between the electorate and voters, as

“acting for”, gives rise to different understandings of the relationship involved reflected in

representatives’ style of representation. One feature of political representation is that it is socially

constructed and it is important to understand the context it emerges from as well as it operates

within. The concept, political representation, was first attributed to legislatures as a whole in the

early days of democracy and only later did it become a feature of individual representatives’ and

parties (Pitkin 1967 via Castiglione and Warren 2006). This brings forth that representation was

first, and still is, a collective (i.e. a legislature or a party) representing a collective (i.e. the nation

or party voters). The representation of those collectives is carried out by individuals who operate

within parties and the electorate votes for those parties and by that giving those parties a mandate

to represent. Based on that political representation is about a collective representing a collective

indicates that it is meaningful to analyse style of representation on the party level and how

parties differ in the emphasis of its representatives (who constitute a collective) on different

styles of representation. In this paper the analysis is on the party level examining how party

attributes explain the difference between parties in its proportion of representatives who are

trustees, partisans or delegates.

Style of representation

Many of the first studies on style of representation originated in the US as early as in the 1960s

(see for example Dalton 1985, Eulau and Karps 1977). Eulau et al. (1959) made a distinction

between the focus and style of representation. The focus refers to whom a representative

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represents such as constituency voters, party voters or the nation as a whole. The style refers to

how representatives approach their role, traditionally classified as trustees and delegates (see for

example Eulau et al. 1959). In practice the focus and twofold classification into trustees and

delegates is closely related, with trustees more prone to consider themselves to represent the

nation as a whole and delegates to focus on specific group(s) (see for example Bengtsson and

Wass 2011, Wessels and Giebler 2011, Eulau et al. 1959).

Because of seemingly limited impact of style of representation on the behaviour of

individual representatives, studies on role-orientation went out of fashion in the 80s, but are now

appearing again on the academic agenda (see for example Blomgren and Rozenberg 2012,

Bengtsson and Wass 2011, Wessels and Giebler 2011). However, it is apparent from both the

early literature as well as recent publications that there is little consensus about how to define

style of representation, what terms to use, what explains it and what are its consequences. While

the trustee versus delegate typology, sometimes adding the partisan as a role, has been quite

dominant, many authors have proposed other terms and definitions such as purposive roles

(Wahlke et al. 1962), position and preference roles (Searing 1994) and policy representation and

interest representation (Thomassen and Esaiasson 2006) - only to name a few examples.

Rozenberg and Blomgren’s (2012) distinction between legislative and representation roles is

quite useful and clarifies the subject; where legislative roles are concerned with how

representatives organize their work in the legislative while representational roles are about whom

to represent as the trustee, delegate and partisan roles do reflect. Another important distinction is

between the output and input of style of representation, the former referring to the consequences

of it and the latter to what explains it. Only if style of representation explains a difference in its

output it becomes meaningful to study what explains its input. While the analysis in this paper is

about the input, I first discuss research and theories about the consequences of different styles of

representation in order to establish the relevance of examining what explains styles of

representation.

The output of style of representation

When analysing representatives’ style of representation it is important not to assume that if there

are behavioural consequences, that the same or similar behaviour can be expected under all

circumstances. Even if representatives are for example classified as trustees that does not mean

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that they will never follow the party policy or voters’ cues in their roll-call vote or other work as

a representatives. It has been established that there are numerous other factors than style of

representation that explains how they make decisions and vote in the parliament, as for example

party discipline (Kristinsson 2011), the limited number of issues representatives can be experts

on and not all issues are important to their constituents (Andeweg 2012). Even if role-orientation

lacks explanatory power when studying legislative behaviour, quite often operationalized as their

roll-call vote (see for example Converse and Pierce 1986, Kuklinski and Elling 1977) it could

very well explain other behaviour of MPs. Style of representation might for example explain

how MPs approach their work in parliamentary committees or question times in parliament and

as pointed out by Andeweg (2012) their interaction and attitudes about voters.

Esaiasson and Holmberg (1996) use the terms bottom-up and top-down representation

about the different mechanism parties use to approach their voters. Top-down representation,

which they show to be dominant in the Swedish parliament, reflects elite driven party politics

where parties seek a mandate from voters to implement the policy preferences of the party.

Bottom-up representation is about incorporating the policy preferences of voters into the party

policy. Using those terms Andeweg (2012) shows that bottom-up representatives in the

Netherlands are in more contact with voters while top-down representatives have more frequent

contact with ministers and officials to discuss the problems of individual citizens. Using the

terms trustees and delegates, adding the role of politicos, which is between the trustee and the

delegate role (sometimes follow voters and sometimes use own judgement), he finds that

delegates are in less contact with voters and more cynical about them. These findings are counter

to what is expected, if it is assumed that delegates should have a more favourable view about

voters’ compared to trustees and politicos. Andeweg suggests that these contradictionary

findings could be a problem with the typology, dividing representatives into trustees, delegates

and politicos; that those roles are a gross over simplification which bears little relevance to

reality. A step forward is to recognize that representatives take on different roles in different

circumstances and regarding different issues.

In a forthcoming paper Onnudottir establishes that style of representation on the party

level does explain policy congruence between parties and its voters. She shows that parties with

a high number of partisans have lower policy congruence with party voters compared to parties

with a high number of trustees who have higher policy congruence with its voters. Her findings

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contradict the Responsible Party Model (RPM) which assumes that representatives sticking to

the party policy is the most optimal way to represent the voters of the party; who should have

according to RPM, have voted for the party that is closest to their own policy preferences. She

suggests that there is possible a bidirectional relationship between style of representation and

policy congruence. Parties with a high number of competent trustees could encourage voters to

trust them and for that reason party voters are closer to them in their policy preferences. On the

voters’ side it could be that if their policy preferences are already close to the parties that could

encourage representatives to take on the trustee role because they are already close to the parties’

potential voters and have to establish that they are sufficiently skilled to solve the policy

problems they are faced with. Onnudottir claims that in this two way relationship parties weigh

more heavily as they are more often the leading actor in the partnership between parties and

voters (Holmberg 2011).

The input of style of representation

An important feature of style of representation using the distinction between trustees, partisans

and delegates is that those are about how representatives think about their representational role

and what source(s) they use (or claim to use) to take decisions. Under the trustee role the source

for decision making is the representative himself, under the partisan role it is the party policy and

under the delegate role the source is the voters. Considering that the main difference between

those roles is the source used it is reasonable to assume that there are different factors linked to

each source that encourage different roles. If individual representatives’ style of representation

could only be explained by their personal background, such as their education or personality that

would mean that it only reflects their personal characteristics and could not be used as a dynamic

analytic tool to study how political context explains style of representation (Jewell 1970 via

Wessels 1999). If, as has been shown, that institutional factors, with features of the electoral

system as the most common explanatory factors (see for example Esaiasson and Heidar 2000,

Wessels 1999) explains style of representation, the importance of understanding how the

political context affects or encourages certain style becomes meaningful to better understand the

representational process.

Even if the effect of the institutional setting of the electoral system on style of

representation has received considerable attention, those studies quite often either include one

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country or only a handful of countries, leading to that the effect of the electoral system can only

be speculated on. However, from this there are a few exceptions. Using data from the European

Election Studies (EES) Wessels (1999) finds that the smaller the district magnitude the more

both European and national MPs focus on their constituency. Farrell and Scully (2010) show that

the more open the electoral systems are, in the sense of a greater flexibility for voters to

influence the placement of candidates on the party list (ballot-structure), the more prone elected

representatives in the European Parliament (EP) are to focus on the constituency. More recently,

Wessels and Giebler (2011) find that the higher the chance candidates for the EP consider

themselves to have of getting elected the less likely they are to be partisans, indicating that the

more secure the candidates’ election is, the less stronghold do the parties hold over them.

Under the rational approach, Strøm (2012) casts style of representation as strategies

representatives use to reach their political goals, whether that is (re-)selection on the party list,

(re-)election or to acquire or maintain a party office. These strategies are conditioned by

contextual factors. The main contextual factors discussed by Strøm are the electoral system and

the parties representatives’ operate within. The most obvious party characteristics as a contextual

effect are its control over the nomination of its candidates and the allocation of party and

parliamentary offices. The greater the control of a party over those processes, the more likely it

would be for representatives to adopt the partisan style - if it increases their chances of

advancement for and within the party. Taking this up to the party level, the more control the

parties’ leaderships have over who is nominated, the higher the proportion of partisans should be

within the parties. This leads to my first hypothesis:

H1: The higher the proportion of party candidates who are nominated by the parties’

leaderships, the higher is the proportion partisans within parties.

Zittel (2012) adopts Strøm’s rational approach explaining style of representation. Using the

German Candidate Survey from 2005, his main contextual factors are party competition, party

socialisation and the mode of the election (elected via party list or in a single seat district). Zittel

finds no support for that party socialisation encourages representatives to take on the partisan

role, but he finds that representatives who consider themselves to have a fair chance of winning

and are elected in single member districts are more inclined to consider themselves to represent

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their district, while representatives who consider it unlikely to win are more inclined to be

partisans. This indicates that representatives’ style of representation is motivated by strategic

factors that enhance their political career, such as their chance of a (re-) selection and (re-)

election, and questions the role of parties in socializing their members.

Zittel operationalizes party socialisation on the individual level as years of party

membership, party employment in years and for how many years representatives have held a

local party office or a regional party office. Finding no support for the effect of party

socialisation through these measurements, but finding that younger representatives are more

leaning towards the partisan role could signal in Zittel’s view increasing professionalization of

politics, with young politicians subscribing to the partisan role as the best strategic choice for

them to advance their careers. This can be taken a step further as implied by Zittel, that once they

have established themselves as politicians, they have more flexibility from their party and

security to adopt other representational roles, such as the trustee role.

Holding a party office is far from the only way to enhance a political career. Parties’

socialisation effect might manifest itself through the support needed when competing for a public

office on the local and/or regional level. Political careers in public office generally take off at the

local and/or regional level. It is rational for representatives on the local and/or regional level to

gain and maintain the support of party elites within their districts (Zittel 2012) to enhance their

political career. For that reason it can be assumed that those who have been elected on those

lower political levels are more likely to be partisans. Based on this I test whether parties who

have a high proportion of representatives who have been elected on the local and/or regional

level are more likely to have a higher proportion of partisans:

H2: The higher the proportion of party candidates who have been elected officials on the

local/and or regional level, the higher is the proportion of partisans within parties.

As already mentioned, not many studies have been published using party characteristics as

explanatory factors for style of representation. Apart from the abovementioned hypothesis about

parties’ leaderships control over nomination and party socialisation based on recent publications,

I suggest that the frequency of parties’ representation in government explains the proportion of

trustees within parties. I assume that representatives of government parties are more likely to

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consider themselves to represent the nation as a whole because presumable the government

works in the interest of all citizens. It has been established that trustees are more likely to have a

nation-wide focus about whom they represent (see for example Wessels and Giebler 2011). If the

nation-wide focus goes together with the trustee role then:

H3: The more often parties have been represented in government the higher is the

proportion of trustees within the parties.

The last hypothesis considers the effect of party voters on the proportion of delegates. Assuming

that the source for decision making is the voters in the delegate case, it can be argued that one of

the main incentives for that role originates stems from the voters’ side. Strøm (2012) argues that

the more a representative is dependent on his constituents for a (re)-election, as feature of the

electoral system and party competition, the more likely it is he will adopt a role that conforms to

the expectations of his constituents. Which roles he would adapt to under those circumstances

could depend on the homogeneity of the constituency. The more heterogeneous the policy

preferences of constituency voters are, the trustee role might be more fruitful, as it will be harder

to advocate the delegate role in a constituency that is highly diverse. Similar, a delegate role

could be more useful the more homogeneity there is within the constituency. While I cannot test

for the homogeneity of the policy preferences within constituencies, I can test whether the

proportion of party identifiers for each party does explain style of representation, assuming that

party identification reflects homogeneity of party identifiers for a given party.

H4: The higher the proportion of party voters who identify with a party, the higher the

proportion of delegates within parties.

Research design

Data and selection of countries

Data on style of representation, the proportion of candidates nominated by parties’ leaderships

and the proportion of candidates who have background as elected representatives on the regional

and/or local level is from the Comparative Candidate Survey (CCS). I kindly remind the reader

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that in I use the term “representatives” interchangeably with “candidates”. The number of

countries and national elections in the CCS data who include the variables of interest are the

following nine: Belgium 2007, Germany 2009, Greece 2007, Hungary 2010, Iceland 2009,

Ireland 2007, Netherlands 2006, Portugal 2009 and Sweden 2010, covering in total 58 parties. In

countries where legislatives are bicameral only representatives running for the lower house are

included in the CCS and the research is therefore limited to those1.

Information about parties’ representation in government is from the Parliament and

Government Composition Database (ParlGov). Three sources are used for the proportion of party

identifiers for each party; the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), the European

Election Study (EES) and the Irish National Election Study (INES).

Response variables: Styles of representation

In the CCS data there are three items that reflect representatives’ style of representation as

trustees, partisans and delegates. Those three are questions are about how an MP should vote in

parliament if there are different opinions between:

1. The party position and his/her party voters’ opinion.

2. Constituency voters’ opinion and MP’s opinion.

3. Party position and MP’s opinion.

I refer both to “constituency voters” and “his/her party voters” as voters2. To classify

representatives’ style of representation into trustees, partisans and delegates I use two out of the

three questions for each group. Those who say that the MP should vote according to his own

1 This applies to Belgium 2007.

2 There is a difference in terminology between questions 1 and 2, when asking voters’ opinions.

The response category to the first question refers to the MP’s own party voters, and the second to

constituency voters. However both are contrasted with either the party position or the MP’s own

opinion. Even if I cannot exclude the possibility that representatives might have replied

differently if the contrast had been the same on the voters’ side on both questions, I assume that

the responses reflect a difference between a bottom-up process as the role of delegate assumes,

and a top-down process inherent in the role of partisans and trustees. Based on that I take those

together who choose voters in question 1 and 2 as delegates and contrast them with partisans and

trustees.

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opinion when contrasted with voters and party in items 2 and 3 are trustees, those who name the

party in items 1 and 3 are partisans and those who say that the MP should follow the voters’ view

in items 1 and 2 are delegates. The representatives who cannot be categorized according to this

rule are coded as “non-classifiable”.

Table 1 lists the proportion of representatives classified under each role for the 58 parties

included in this study. It is notable that in 51 out of the 58 parties less than 15% of the candidates

are non-classifiable and 53 of them less than 20%. The systematic low proportion of non-

classifiables indicates the there is a systematic component in representatives’ replies that can be

used to categorize them as trustees, partisans or delegates. At the bottom of the table, the total

proportions for each style are shown firstly for the pooled un-weighted data, secondly weighted

by country and thirdly by party. In the analysis representatives’ replies are not weighted since the

unit of analysis is at the party level. For party measures on style of representation, I use the

proportion of representatives within parties who are; 1) trustees, 2) partisans or 3) delegates.

Representatives that are non-classifiable are included in the calculation for the proportion of each

style group within parties, but not analysed any further. An example of party measures for the

Socialist Party in Belgium is 34.9 for the proportion of trustees, 37.2 for the proportion of

partisans and 14.0 for the proportion of delegates.

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Table 1. Proportion of partisans, delegates, trustees and non-classifiable within parties

Trustees Partisans DelegatesNon-

classifablesN

Belgium

Socialist Party (PS) 34.9% 37.2% 14.0% 14.0% 43

Reformist Movement - (MR) 32.6% 28.3% 13.0% 26.1% 46

Humanist Democratic Center (CDH) 33.3% 44.4% 8.3% 13.9% 36

Ecolo 27.3% 47.7% 2.3% 22.7% 44

National Front (FN) 20.8% 25.0% 50.0% 4.2% 24

Christian Democratic and Flemish (CD&V) 33.3% 41.7% 14.6% 10.4% 48

Soicalist Party. Different (SP.A) 28.6% 57.1% 14.3% 0.0% 35

Spirit 25.0% 62.5% 12.5% 0.0% 8

Open VLD (Flemish Liberals and Democrats) 30.0% 30.0% 30.0% 10.0% 50

Flemist Interest (Vlaams Belang - VB) 29.4% 41.2% 20.6% 8.8% 34

Green! (Groen) 48.2% 32.1% 12.5% 7.1% 56

Germany

Social Democratic Party (SPD) 56.3% 19.9% 9.3% 14.6% 151

Christian Democratic Union (CDU) 72.7% 11.5% 9.4% 6.5% 139

Christian Social Union (CSU) 87.5% 0.0% 4.2% 8.3% 24

Free Democratic Party (FDP) 77.6% 6.3% 5.6% 10.5% 143

Alliance 90 / Greens 79.5% 4.6% 7.9% 7.9% 151

Left Party 51.8% 13.1% 23.4% 11.7% 137

Greece

New Democracy 23.1% 47.4% 20.5% 9.0% 78

Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) 40.2% 27.1% 24.3% 8.4% 107

HungaryFidesz / KDNP (Hungarian Civic Union / Christian

Democratic Peoples Party) 14.3% 27.2% 40.8% 17.7% 147

MSZP (Hungarian Socialist Party) 15.4% 46.2% 26.9% 11.5% 52

Jobbik 14.5% 9.1% 73.6% 2.7% 110

LMP (Politics Can be Different) 38.8% 7.5% 41.8% 11.9% 67

Iceland

Social Democratic Alliance (SDA) 58.1% 10.8% 16.2% 14.9% 74

Progressive Party (PP) 61.5% 16.9% 7.7% 13.8% 65

Independence Party (IP) 73.2% 8.9% 7.1% 10.7% 56

Left Green Movement (LG) 52.9% 13.2% 17.6% 16.2% 68

Civic Movement (CM) 63.5% 6.3% 25.4% 4.8% 63

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Table 1 continued…

Trustees Partisans DelegatesNon-

classifablesN

Ireland

Fianna Fáil (FF) 14.3% 57.1% 7.1% 21.4% 42

Fine Gael (FG) 30.6% 44.4% 8.3% 16.7% 36

Labour 17.6% 47.1% 23.5% 11.8% 17

Green Party 28.6% 53.6% 14.3% 3.6% 28

Progressive Democrats (PD) 11.1% 44.4% 11.1% 33.3% 9

Sinn Féin (SF) 0.0% 66.7% 16.7% 16.7% 12

Netherlands

Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) 30.0% 56.7% 0.0% 13.3% 30

PvdA Labour Party 47.6% 33.3% 9.5% 9.5% 21

Peoples Party for Freedom and Democracry (VVD) 46.2% 30.8% 15.4% 7.7% 26

Green Left (GroenLinks) 72.7% 27.3% 0.0% 0.0% 11

Socialist Party (Socialistische Partij - SP) 28.0% 64.0% 0.0% 8.0% 25

Democrats 66 (Democraten 66) 72.2% 22.2% 0.0% 5.6% 18

Christian Union (ChristenUnie - CU) (GPV, RPF) 33.3% 55.6% 0.0% 11.1% 9

Political Reformed Party (SGP) 27.3% 63.6% 9.1% 0.0% 11

Partij vd Dieren 27.3% 36.4% 9.1% 27.3% 11

Portugal

Left Bloc (BE) 39.0% 12.2% 39.0% 9.8% 41

Peoples Party (CDS-PP) 33.3% 18.5% 37.0% 11.1% 54

Democratic Unity Coalition (CDU) 20.0% 52.0% 28.0% 0.0% 25

Social Democratic (PSD) 42.9% 26.5% 22.4% 8.2% 49

Socialist (PS) 52.0% 24.0% 16.0% 8.0% 25

Sweden

Center Party 37.8% 38.8% 16.3% 7.1% 196

Liberal Party 38.8% 26.5% 21.8% 12.9% 147

Christian Democrats 38.5% 36.5% 15.1% 9.9% 192

Green Party 42.1% 21.8% 27.4% 8.6% 197

Moderate party 24.6% 46.9% 17.6% 10.9% 256

Social Democrats 24.6% 53.1% 12.5% 9.8% 256

Sweden Democrats 24.0% 60.0% 12.0% 4.0% 25

Left Party 34.2% 39.0% 16.6% 10.2% 187

Total 40.6% 29.4% 19.5% 10.5% 4065

Weighted by country 38.1% 30.8% 18.1% 9.7%

Weighted by party 37.9% 33.2% 18.3% 10.6%

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Explanatory variables: Party characteristics

The study makes use of four explanatory variables: the proportion of party candidates who are

nominated by the parties’ leaderships, the proportion of candidates who have background as

elected members of local and/or regional MPs, how often the parties have been represented in

government and the proportion of party identifiers among their voters.

For a measure on parties’ leaderships control over who is nominated I use data from the

CCS. Respondents were asked who made the decision about their nomination as candidates and

the response categories are;

a) Voters at large

b) Voters of my party.

c) Members of my party.

d) A party delegate conference.

e) Party leadership3.

For a measure on the party leaderships’ control over who is nominated, I contrast parties’

leaderships’ control with other selectors, whether those are a party delegate conference, party

members, party voters, voters at large or other selectors. For parties’ socialisation effect I use the

proportion of representatives of a given party who have been elected for local and/or regional

office.

Data from ParlGov is used to construct a measure on parties’ representation in

government. This measure is the proportion of days the parties have been represented in

government in the past four electoral terms preceding the election under study in each country.

Information about the proportion of party identifiers among the voters of each party are from the

third wave of the Comparative Study of Political Systems (CSES) for Iceland, Germany,

Netherlands and Portugal, from European Election Study 2009 (EES) study for Belgium, Greece,

Hungary and Sweden, from and from the INES (Irish National Election Study) for Ireland. For

this measure I use the proportion of party identifiers among actual (did vote for the party) or

3 Not all nine countries used all the five categories. For example in the German data the options

were between a delegate conference either within constituencies or nation-wide both resulting in

the same code for all parties (a party delegate conference).

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potential (intends to vote for the party)4 voters of the party assuming that the effect of party

identification depends on the base of “secure” party voters.

Control variables

Earlier research has shown that candidate centred politics in comparison with party centred

politics seem to encourage the delegate role (see for example Farrell and Scully 2010). This is

quite often operationalized as a distinction between majoritarian (candidate centred) and

proportional (party centred) systems. As the countries included in this study all make use of

different versions of a proportional electoral system I cannot use this traditional distinction to

control for setting of the electoral system. Moreover, this twofold classification into majoritarian

and proportional systems is probably too simplistic as it does not capture the different levels of

proportion systems, some of them being “more” proportional compared to others. A different

way would be to use the district magnitude of constituencies, where a higher magnitude reflects

in general a more proportional system. Unfortunately there is not information about candidates’

constituency for all nine countries in the CCS data and for that reason I do not use constituencies

district magnitude as a measure. Instead I use the number of effective parties within each

country, with lower number indicating a less proportional system compared to a higher number.

For the number of effective parties, I use the relative seat share of parties in the parliament.5

At the end I control for Hungary as a former member of the Eastern European communist

regime. The modern party system in Hungary is younger compared to the other countries in

included in this study, and it is still debated whether it has stabilized itself or not (see for

example Róbert and Papp 2012, Zsolt 2006). For that reason it is possible that the party

indicators used in this study have less or different impact in Hungary on style of representation

compared to other countries included in this study.

4 In the data from the CSES and INES (Iceland, Ireland, Germany, Netherlands and Portugal) the

proportion of party identifiers is based on the reported vote (actual voters). The EES data

(Belgium, Greece and Hungary) is from 2009, two years after the general elections made use of

in the CCS in Belgium and Greece (2007) and one year before the elections in Hungary and

Sweden (2010). For Belgium and Greece I use the reported vote from the last national election

(in both instances the 2007 elections) and for Hungary and Sweden I use the vote intention in the

next national election (in both instances the 2010 elections). 5 Formula used is: Number of effective parliamentary parties=1/∑((proportion of seats in the

parliament)2).

16

Data analysis

In order to examine how parties’ leaderships’ control over nomination, the proportion of party

representatives’ who have experience as elected officials, how often the parties have been

represented in government and the proportion of party voters who identify with the party

explains style of representation I use Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression. The response

variables are the proportion of representatives within parties who are trustees, partisans or

delegates. Apparently, there is a potential small-n problem, with only 58 parties and the three

proportions for style of representation are not independent of each other, as a higher proportion

in one style group is followed by lower proportions in the other two groups. For those reasons, I

run three OLS regressions in six steps, one for each of the three style groups adding one variable

(altogether six variables) at the time. In my discussion I focus on significant parameters. It

should be kept in mind that the parties included are not chosen randomly and for that reason the

significance levels are only meaningful as indicators about the strength of the relationship

between the explanatory variables and the response variable among the 58 parties included.

My first hypothesis (H1) that the higher the proportion of candidates who are nominated

by the parties’ leaderships, the higher is the proportion of partisans is supported. However

including only parties’ leadership control over nomination as a single explanatory variable in the

first step with the proportion of partisans as the response variable, the effect seems weak and it is

non-significant. What weighs more heavily is the proportion of their candidates who have

experience as elected MPs at the local and /or regional level, while other party characteristics do

not explain the proportion of partisans within parties. It is notable that the effect of parties’

leaderships control over nomination is positive for both the proportion of partisans and delegates

once all explanatory have been entered into the calculation, while it is negative for the proportion

of trustees. This indicates that the less control parties’ leaderships have over the nomination, the

greater flexibility its representatives, as a collective, have to adopt the trustee role.

The relationship between party socialisation and the proportion of partisans is as expected

(H2); the higher the proportion of representatives that have a background in local and/or regional

17

Table 2. Determinants of style of representation.

% of party representatives who:

Are nominated by the party

leadership-.31* -.33* -.35** -.35** -.47** -.44** .19 .24* .25* .28* .27+ .28+ .21 .17 .20 .13 .30* .26*

Have been represented in local

and or/regional politics-.16 -.21 -.21 -.21 -.28* .45*** .48*** .52*** .52*** .51*** -.38** -.31* -.39** -.39** -.30**

Party variables

Representation in government .24+ .24+ .24+ .24+ -.12 -.10 -.10 -.10 -.28* -.31** -.30** -.30**

Proportion of party identifiers

(among party voters)-.01 -.03 .06 -.14 -.15 -.13 .31* .34** .22+

Country variables

Number of effective parties .27+ .13 .02 -.01 -.37** -.18

Hungary -.27+ -.04 .37**

Intercept, p value: .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .149 .128 .060 .134 .136 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000

R2: .10 .12 .18 .18 .23 .28 .04 .24 .25 .27 .27 .27 .04 .18 .26 .34 .45 .54

Change in R2 significant, p value: .017 .029 .063 .950 .053 .067 .145 .001 .336 .256 .898 .770 .119 .004 .026 .012 .003 .002

% of trustees within parties

Standardized Betas Standardized Betas Standardized Betas

% of partisans within parties % of delegates within parties

Note: Response variables are three; the proportion of candidates within each party who are 1) trustees, 2) partisans and 3) delegates. Significance levels: +p<0.1; *p<0.05; **p<0.01;

***p<0.001. N=58 parties

18

politics the higher is the proportion of partisans. Examining this for the other two style groups,

the direction is the opposite for the proportion of delegates (the higher the proportion of

representatives who have background in local/and or regional politics, the lower is the proportion

of delegates) but seems to have no or a weak connection with the proportion of trustees as it only

becomes significant after all explanatory variables have been entered into the calculation.

Third hypothesis (H3) is supported; the more often a party has been represented in

government the higher is the proportion of trustees within parties. This supports the assumption

that representatives of government parties are more likely to consider themselves to represent the

nation as a whole as is inherent in the trustee role. The effect of representation in government has

an opposite effect on the proportion of delegates; the more often parties have been represented in

government the lower is the proportion of delegates. For the proportion of partisans, the relation

is non-significant.

The fourth and final hypothesis (H4), that the higher the proportion of party identifiers

among party voters the higher is the proportion of delegates, is supported as well. It could

indicate that representatives of parties who have a high base of party identifiers among its voters

are more inclined, as a collective, to promote the delegate role. This is possible due to the

homogeneity of party voters assuming party identifiers of the same party are similar among

them; and that this homogeneity encourages representatives to promote the delegate role as a

strategic way of maximize the parties’ vote share. For the other two style groups, trustees and

partisans, the proportion of party identifiers is non-significant. The explanatory variables used

here explain the highest variance when examining the proportion of delegates with R2 as high

as.54 in the full model, compared to R2 .28 and .27 for the proportion of trustees and partisans.

Discussion

In this research I have established that the context of political parties does matter for style of

representation emphasised within parties. I show that there are partly different incentives for the

partisan, trustee and delegate roles. The subject of my first two hypotheses, that the higher the

proportions of candidates who are nominated by the parties leaderships and who have

background in local and/or regional politics, the higher is the proportion of partisans within

parties, are both supported. Out of those two, the background in local and/or regional politics

19

seems to weigh more heavily compared to parties’ leaderships control over nomination – at least

as parties’ leaderships control over nomination is measured in this study.

For the proportion of trustees within parties my third hypothesis, that the more often

parties have been represented in government the higher is the proportion of trustees, is supported

as well. This could indicate that office seeking parties (those who are more often represented in

government) provide incentives to adopt the trustee role. This is perhaps so because government

status encourages a nation-wide focus of representation which is inherited in the trustee role and

that representatives of those parties aim for establishing themselves as sufficiently skilled

trustees to deal with the policy problems they are faced with.

For parties with a high proportion of delegates, the proportion of party identifiers among

its voters seems to matter. Supporting my fourth hypothesis I show that the higher the proportion

of party identifiers parties have, the higher is the proportion of delegates, while this does not

matter for the two other style groups. It is notable when comparing the final models (who include

all explanatory variables) that all four explanatory factors, parties’ leaderships control over

nomination, background in local and/or regional politics, representation in government and party

identification have a significant relation to the proportion of delegates while three two out of four

explain the proportion of trustees and two out of four the proportion of partisans. As already

discussed I assume that there are partly different incentives for each style, depending on the

source for decision making inherent in each style. My results confirm that. Parties’ leaderships

control over nomination and party socialisation (background in local and/or regional politics)

seem to have an effect on all three style groups, representation in government matters for the

proportion of trustees and delegates and the proportion of party identifiers only connects to the

proportion of delegates.

The assumption that the features of the source used for decision making provides

different explanatory factors for each role is easily argued for partisans and delegates. Using the

party as a source for decision making as partisans, it is reasonable to argue that the attributes of

the parties are the main explanatory factors. Using the voters’ as a source in the case of

delegates, it is reasonable to argue that the features of party voters are important. This

assumption is harder to apply to the role of the trustee because the source is representatives

themselves. However, it becomes meaningful when comparing what encourages the trustee roles

with the other two roles. Contrasting trustees with partisans, the less control the parties’

20

leaderships have over the nomination the greater is the flexibility for representatives of a given

party to adopt the trustee role. In this contrast the source is important in the sense that it both

explains the role of the partisan and the trustee, but with opposite effects. A similar argument can

be made when contrasting trustees with delegates. If the voters as a source are important for

delegates and not for trustees it is reasonable to assume the proportion of party identifiers has a

positive relation with the proportion of delegates, but non-significant with the proportion of

trustees. Again the source delegates use (or claim to use) is of importance in this contrast.

While I do recognize the tentative character of my argument, I do believe that it is

worthwhile to investigate further how the source for decision making does explain different

styles of representation emphasised within each party. This I believe has to be done within the

context of party characteristics as is done here. Moreover, it is worthwhile to take the research

further and examine how the effect of different party characteristics adding for example party

discipline, interact with the institutional setting of the electoral system such as the district

magnitude and ballot structure, in their effect on styles of representation emphasised within

parties.

21

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