The impact of occupational background on issue representation

Abstract

Descriptive representation matters for substantive representation. Yet, one key legislator characteristic has received comparatively little attention in research on substantive representation: the occupational background of members of parliament. In this article, it is argued that occupational background shapes patterns of representation since the choice of occupation both indicates certain interests while also generating expertise in issues related to the job. In order to assess this proposition, there is an analysis of whether local councillors’ occupations affect their issue emphasis in the local council and to what extent this effect is moderated by parties’ issue saliences. Empirically, the study focuses on local councillors’ issue emphasis using data on 1,269 local councillors in Germany between 2011 and 2020. The results have important implications for understanding local councillors’ descriptive and substantive representation as they show that occupation matters: councillors emphasise issues related to their occupation more often than other representatives.

Keywords:

• Issue representation
• occupation
• descriptive representation
• substantive representation
• Germany
• parliamentary questions

Acknowledgements

Previous versions of this article have been presented at the Annual General Conference of the European Political Science Association 2022. We thank the panel participants for their valuable suggestions and helpful feedback. We are grateful to Louis Drexler, Hanna Hieronymus, Aaron Reudenbach, Janina Schindler, Sinéad Thielen, Katia Werkmeister, and Annica Missy for excellent research assistance.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1 This category refers to working-class occupations that are disproportionately occupied by women, such as occupations in social services, education, or health support jobs.

2 PQs were automatically collected from the Ratsinformationssysteme (online council information systems), which provide councillors and the public with detailed information on council proceedings.

3 North Rhine-Westphalia has a two-tiered electoral system where the majority tier and the proportional tier are combined in a single vote. Candidates with a vote plurality in the single-member districts are directly elected, while the remaining seats are allocated using proportional representation (Velimsky et al. 2023).

4 Party fixed effects are not presented for ease of exposition.

5 Descriptive statistics for the independent and control variables are provided in Online Appendix A4.

6 We pre-processed both the election manifestos and the parliamentary questions by removing white spaces, punctuation and German stop words, and converted all words to lower case.

7 We focus on the six largest parties in Germany that are represented in the German Bundestag in the 19th legislative period (2017–2021): the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Christian Democratic Union, together with the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CDU/CSU), the Free Democratic Party (FDP), the Alliance 90/The Greens (Greens), the SPD, and The Left (Die LINKE). All other parties are subsumed under the category ‘Other’.

8 We created a count variable for zero-inflated Negative Binomial models. The variable measures the number of PQs local councillors submitted per topic.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this project was provided by the German Research Foundation through grant numbers GR 5526/1-1 and NY 123/1-1.

Notes on contributors

Jan A. Velimsky

Jan A. Velimsky is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Theory and Empirical Democracy Research, University of Stuttgart. He works on local politics, representation, political participation and democratic preferences, focusing on disadvantaged groups. [[email protected]]

Sebastian Block

Sebastian Block is a Research Associate at Leibniz University Hannover and a Ph.D. candidate at Ludwig Maximilians University Munich. He works on computational social science methods, text-as-data methods, party politics, legislative politics, and local politics. [[email protected]]

Martin Gross

Martin Gross is an Associate Professor (Akad. Rat a. L) at the Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science, Ludwig Maximilians University Munich. He works on local politics, political institutions, party competition, coalition politics in multi-level systems, and EU cohesion policy. [[email protected]]

Dominic Nyhuis

Dominic Nyhuis is Professor for Quantitative Political Science Methods at Leibniz University Hannover. His research focuses on national and subnational political institutions with a particular emphasis on legislative and party politics. [[email protected]]