Pre-parliamentary party career and political representation

Abstract

Members of parliament are accountable to both their district and party. Consequently, they have to balance their responsiveness to these competing principals when their preferences diverge. Existing research on this representational dilemma focuses mostly on the role of political institutions, whereas this article offers a new individual-level explanation: pre-parliamentary party careers. Using sequence analysis, three ideal-typical pre-parliamentary career paths are identified: the party local, the party functionary, and the party civilian. The share of party locals increases over time at the expense of party civilians in the Danish parliament, and these party locals are more likely to diverge from the party’s position when it is unpopular among their constituents. These findings corroborate existing evidence of political professionalisation in parliamentary democracies, but they also suggest that professionalisation may be associated with a localisation of politics leading to more rather than less constituency representation.     

International Law as Language—Towards a “Neo” New Haven School

This paper examines the tension between the mainstream belief in international law as a source of objectivity distinct from politics and its new stream critics that question the validity of such a distinction. It is argued that, as a type of language, international law is not distinct from politics as a function of objectivity, but rather by the fact that it serves the international community’s thymos. The phenomena of global administrative law and NATO’s use of force in Kosovo are analyzed as examples of how the thymos drives international law. Building on feminist theories of international law, the article sets forth a vision of international law as the primary communicative device for the international community’s thymos.     

Constituent Demand and District‐Focused Legislative Representation

Legislative responsiveness to constituent demands is integral to the concept of representation. Yet, research on district‐focused legislative behavior and priorities, such as allocating resources to districts, has largely ignored constituent demand as an explanatory variable. In this article, we propose a demand‐based theory of district‐targeted legislative resource allocation. The theoretical model suggests that district demand for legislative resources is determined by the district’s relative deprivation of such resources and that legislators have an electoral incentive to respond to district demand due to the credit‐claiming opportunities associated with doing so. These possibilities are tested with region‐wide mass and elite survey data from Latin America, and the results suggest that constituent demand is not only a normatively but also an empirically important predictor of district‐focused legislative behavior.