MPs' Role Orientations in Newly Emerged Democratic Legislatures

Abstract

Understanding the behaviour of the elected representatives at the beginning of the transition period in former Communist countries provides an insight into some of the first freely elected parliaments after decades of authoritarianism. The role perception grasps the essence of how MPs position themselves in their decision-making process in a fuzzy institutional setting. By relying on the sole established institutions for that period (that is, political parties), this article tests to what extent the party type and size explain role orientations of the MPs in terms of delegates (from the party), trustees, and politicos. Using a dataset that includes over 600 MPs from four parliaments, this cross-national analysis reveals that MPs belonging to newly emerged and rather small parties are more likely to be party delegates compared with their colleagues.

Keywords:

• legislature
• role perceptions
• MPs
• post-communist
• new democracies

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Rudy Andeweg, Tom Louwerse, Petr Kopecký, Simon Otjes, Marc Uriot, Cynthia van Vonno, and the three anonymous reviewers of the journal for their useful feedback, comments, and specific suggestions on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

There are seven post-Communist states, but GDR is eliminated from the universe after merging with FRG.

Both Fenno and Mayhew are cited by K. Strøm (1997, p. 159), and the personal argument of K. Strøm can also be found (at p. 160).

There are three organisational developments that fall under the continuous party type. First, there are parties actively involved in the opposition activities during Communism (for example, Confederation for Independent Poland and Christian Democratic Union-Czech People's Party). Second, there were parties (for example, Polish Peasant Party) tolerated by the Communist regime as they became satellites of the single party. The third type is known as successor parties and refers to those political organisations that took over the structure of the previous single party (for example, the Hungarian Socialist Party).

For methodological reasons, the relative size of the parties is considered, the reference being the share of seats within the national legislature. For reasons of convenience ‘size’ is used from this moment onwards.

Grateful thanks to the Department of Political Science from University of Leiden for providing the data of the project.

For reasons of accuracy, it was checked whether by changing the boundaries of the categories, results would differ. The result of such a test indicates that the categories would have to be dramatically modified to influence the obtained results.

Poland had a provisional Constitution in 1992, ‘The Little Constitution’, but a final version was drafted in 1997 as a result of the 1993–97 legislature.

For Poland, eliminating the outlier results in an increase of the correlation coefficient to 0.2 and it becomes statistically significant at the 0.05 level.

For this correlation Cramer's V was used although the independent variable is ordinal. The assumption was relaxed about this variable and it was considered nominal.

The multivariate logistical regression analysis confirms the findings of the bivariate statistical tests and does not add substantial findings.

The logit analysis indicates no reason to work with the interaction effect of the two variables as no substantive information is gained if doing so.