Project Details
Projekt
NaPRe The Nature of Political Representation in Times of Dealignment
Subject Area
Political Science
Term
from 2018 to 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 396974733
Weakening partisanship in West European electorates results in increasing disconnection between citizens and the state; raising pressing questions regarding future mechanisms of political representation that could sustain responsive government. To explore this serious challenge to democratic governance, this project investigates the viability, and conditions of, dyadic forms of representation in established European democracies. We particularly aim to study whether individual MPs pay attention to citizen-initiated inquiries in low information environments, what types of cues most often gain their attention, and how electoral contexts condition the interactions of citizens and MPs. We explore these specific research questions via field experiments to better understand the underlying causal mechanisms. In these experiments, e-mails written by fictitious constituents are sent to inquire about the main political concerns and past achievements of MPs and to treat them with different cues to get their attention. We supplement these field experiments with extensive tests for their internal and external validity, using quantitative text analysis of both the response e-mails, to secure for internal validity, and the parliamentary questions tabled by MPs, to test for external validity. Finally, we use a small-N comparison between three political systems to draw inferences about the contextual prerequisites of individual level responsiveness, mainly focusing on electoral contexts.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
International Connection
Netherlands, United Kingdom
