MPs Roles and Representation
This book examines the content of MPs activities through which parliamentarians generate representative claims.
Challenging the idea that studying individual representation is a futile exercise, this book shows that looking at the opinions and behavioural patterns of parliamentarians can shed light on some important questions: What are the interests represented in parliament? How important are electoral incentives in shaping the role of representatives? What is the impact of parliamentarians personal characteristics? Focussing on the role played by Italian members of the Chamber of Deputies across a period of more than 20 years, the study applies role analysis to connect the normative debates on political representation to empirical studies and is underpinned by a rich data set of parliamentary activities and surveys on parliamentarians attitudes and opinions.
The book will be of key interest to scholars and students of legislative studies, European politics, Italian studies/politics, and more broadly to comparative politics.
Federico Russo is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Salento, Italy.
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MPs Roles and Representation
Orientations, Incentives and Behaviours in Italy
Federico Russo
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MPs Roles and Representation
Orientations, Incentives and Behaviours in Italy
Federico Russo
First published 2022
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2022 Federico Russo
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ISBN: 978-0-367-20867-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-15875-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-26382-8 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780429263828
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Contents
This book was written in one year, but it is the outcome of quite a long journey. I became interested in the role of elected representatives when I was an undergraduate student at the University of Pisa in the early 2000s, in a cultural climate in which the concept of political participation was regarded as much more appealing than that of representation. Unfortunately, at the time I was not aware that representation is not an unfortunate compromise between an ideal of direct democracy and messy modern realities (Plotke 1997, p. 19) and that participation and representation are not at odds. I simply felt that the quality of our democracies depended to a large extent on the quality of the political class and the attitudes of its members. After having studied this topic for a rather long period, I realised how true that is.
In these years I have learnt much about the success of rational choice models to explain what happens within legislative assemblies. However, this book is firmly based on the belief that to make sense of politicians behaviour, it is essential to know how they think about their role. This does not mean that self-interest and objective incentives are not important. When it comes to studying individuals holding highly coveted positions, they are surely an important part of the story. Nevertheless, they are not the whole story. The major problem in legislative studies is finding a framework to incorporate the logic of appropriateness and the logic of consequentiality within the same research design. I believe that the old concept of role offers the analytical categories to do so, and this book is an attempt to take some steps towards this goal.
Before thanking the many people that helped me with this project, I wish to express my regrets about one weakness of this book. To shed light on the interaction between incentives and personal attitudes, I planned to conduct a series of face-to-face interviews with a sample of Italian deputies. I gathered the first interviews in Rome in mid-February 2020, only a few weeks before Italy imposed a lockdown to try to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Initially, I shifted to telephone and video interviews. However, I soon realised these methods did not work well for obtaining the kind of information I was interested in. The 12 interviews that I gathered were not sufficient to be systematically incorporated into this research. Nevertheless, I have learnt much from them. I express my gratitude to all the deputies who accepted to be interviewed.
Writing this book was mainly a lonely exercise, but my research was profoundly influenced by several people with whom I have worked over the years. I owe an obvious intellectual debt to Maurizio Cotta and Luca Verzichelli, the kind of debt I cannot hope to repay. In addition to teaching me the basics of this profession and writing fundamental works on the Italian political class, they were the ones responsible for building and maintaining the CIRCaP archive on the Italian political class on which I relied in this book. Speaking of data, this work has benefitted enormously from the generosity of Guido Legnante, who shared with me the precious interviews he conducted in the nineties. Some of the ideas presented in this book were firstly developed a couple of years ago during several conferences, following discussions with brilliant colleagues such as Enrico Borghetto, Thomas Daubler, Elisabetta De Giorgi, Shane Martin, Francesco Marangoni, Julien Navarro, Zsfia Papp, Jos Real-Dato and Thomas Saalfeld. I had the opportunity to present the first version of in January 2020 in a workshop organised by Nathalie Brack in Brussels. I express my gratitude to Katrin Auel, Anne-Sophie Behm, Marie-Eve Blanger, Mihail Chiru, William Daniel, Daniel Hhmann, Verena Kunz and Awenig Mari who attended that workshop and contributed to the discussion.
