Legislative scholars know generally little about how the recent phenomenon of campaign individualization (Zittel and Gschwend 2008; Marsh 2009; Chiru 2012) influences individual MP behavior. Their ignorance is even more widespread when it comes to the ways in which the incentives created by the institutional structure (electoral and parliamentary rules) mediate this relationship.
One possible scenario is that electoral rules, which put a premium on cultivating a personal vote (Carey and Shugart 1995), create for some MPs strong incentives to campaign on individual and constituency-related promises. This could lead, in turn, to more voting dissent and to increased engagement in district-centred behaviour (i.e. constituency service).
This paper relies on a complex dataset which matches candidate survey data from the most recent elections in Hungary (2010) and Romania (2012) with the legislators’ use of parliamentary questions in order to analyze whether the variation in campaigning styles has an impact on individualized legislative behavior. More precisely, it aims to reveal the degree in which personalized campaigns explain the use of parliamentary questions for advancing constituency service purposes.
The selection of countries with multiple electoral channels amounts to a quasi-experimental design, in which the effect of many potentially confounding variables can be held constant. Moreover, the study goes beyond the limits of works that investigated mixed systems (Bawn and Thies 2003, Shugart and Wattenberg 2001, Zittel and Gschwend 2008) by exploiting some minor, but theoretically important differences between the two countries: while in Romania all politicians run as SMD candidates, and only the logic of seat allocation separates them into two groups, in Hungary some are SMD candidates, others are list candidates, and a third group is present in both channels.
