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.

Keywords:

• Denmark
• pre-parliamentary careers
• recruitment
• representation
• sequence analysis
• voting advice application

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Independent Research Fund Denmark for supporting this research (project: 4182-00065B). We would also like to thank participants at the 2018 ECPR General Conference Panel on Institutions and Parliamentary Careers for helpful and inspiring feedback and the anonymous reviewers for taking time to read our manuscript and provide challenging comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Our argument is consistent with Keena and Knight-Finley’s (2018) finding that US Senators are more likely to diverge from their party’s position when they have previously held gubernatorial office. Furthermore, Ohmura et al. (2018) show that pre-parliamentary party careers matter for career success after entry into the parliament and Bailer et al. (2013) show that pre-parliamentary careers matter to attitudes towards representation and party loyalty.

2 The time period covered for the 1960 cohort is 1957–1968. The time period covered for the 2010 cohort is 2005–2015.

3 The question of how to set the costs has been approached in different ways (Abbott and Tsay 2000: 10–11; Gauthier et al. 2014: 10; Lesnard 2014). Given the multiple party routes leading to a parliamentary seat, we do not argue that the most typical pre-parliamentary party route is to climb all the steps on the party ladder, as shown in Table 2. Rather, we argue that each of these positions may serve as a party springboard to enter the national parliament. We therefore chose a constant substitution cost and set the cost of insertion or deletion to half of that cost. We standardise the pairwise distances with respect to length (Macindoe and Abbott 2004) by dividing the final pairwise distance with the length of the longest sequence in the pair (for a use of similar procedures, see Abbott and Hrycak 1990: 154; Abbott and Tsay 2000: 12–13; Macindoe and Abbott 2004).

4 We have checked other clustering algorithms (average, complete, and single linkage), which result in the same number of clusters and categorisations of MPs.

5 We would have liked to disentangle this large group further, but the cluster solution allowing us to separate members of this group was not of a high enough quality in terms of securing intra-cluster homogeneity and inter-cluster heterogeneity.

6 To further investigate the expected changes in pre-parliamentary party careers over time, we used a multinomial logistic regression model including a dummy cohort variable as the independent variable (2010 coded as ‘1’) and MP gender and party dummies as controls since the composition of parties and share of female MPs change over time, potentially influencing the career paths. We arrive at similar results and report the simple frequencies. Full models are shown in Online Appendix B.

7 In total 179 members are elected to the Danish parliament. Four are elected on the Faroese islands and in Greenland. These four MPs did not participate in the Voting Advice Application survey.

8 The difference between party locals and party functionaries is statistically significant at the p < 0.05 level (p = 0.025), and the difference between party functionaries and party civilians is significant at the p < 0.1 level (p = 0.09).

9 The issues were chosen according to a criterion of maximising the number of different types of issue dimensions.

10 We operationalise the variable in this way because we wanted to make sure that divergence is measured as a position that is not in the same direction as the party’s position. To check the robustness of this result we have also investigated a model where we regress raw MP positions on party and district voter positions. These results are shown in Online Appendix E, and they are similar to the results in the main paper both in terms of substance and statistical significance.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anne Skorkjær Binderkrantz

Anne Skorkjær Binderkrantz is Professor of Political Science, Aarhus University. Her research focuses on the political role of interest groups, political elites, and public governance. She has published in journals such as the Journal of European Public Policy, British Journal of Political Science, and European Journal of Political Research. [[email protected]]

Marie Kaldahl Nielsen

Marie Kaldahl Nielsen is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University. Her research focuses on legislative behaviour, political parties, and representation. She has recently published her work in Party Politics and Parliamentary Affairs. [[email protected]]

Helene Helboe Pedersen

Helene Helboe Pedersen is Professor in Political Science at Aarhus University. Her main research interests are representation, legislative behaviour, political parties, and interest groups. She has recently published her work on these subjects in Party Politics, European Journal of Political Research, Electoral Studies, and Parliamentary Affairs. [[email protected]]

Mathias Wessel Tromborg

Mathias Wessel Tromborg is an Assistant Professor at Aarhus University. His research focuses on linkages between voters and their representatives in parliamentary democracies. His work has been published in journals such as the British Journal of Political Science, European Journal of Political Research, and Political Studies. [[email protected]]