Abstract
Much of the literature on legislatures in parliamentary democracies has assumed that parties are unitary actors or studied why party unity is generally high (Sieberer 2006). While there is much evidence suggesting that parties are indeed important in structuring parliamentary work, personalized parliamentary behaviour has recently received more scholarly attention (e.g. Bräuninger, Brunner, and Däubler 2012). Such behaviour is often related to electoral incentives (but see Martin 2012), but personalization is not necessarily limited to countries with personalized electoral systems. The proposed paper provides a longitudinal analysis of personalized parliamentary behaviour under the condition of weak electoral incentives for personalization. The key questions of our proposal is: to what extent and under what conditions is parliamentary behaviour personalized in systems without personalized electoral systems?
In contrast to earlier work, we look at personalization of parliamentary behaviour in terms of “a shift in salience from the political party to the individual politician” (van Holsteyn and Andeweg 2010, 629). First, we look at the distribution of parliamentary activity. If all MPs are true party delegates, differences in the degree to which MPs for a party are active should be limited; if, however, some MPs desire to present a strong personal profile, they will be more active than others. Absent of electoral incentives, individualized behaviour may be caused by candidate selection (Rahat and Hazan 2001; Shomer 2009). Second, we look at the factors explaining legislative success: are proposals adopted because of party-level factors or do individual-level explanations come into play (Fowler 2006)?
The proposed paper looks at the case of the Netherlands, a country with a single national electoral constituency, semi-open list system, high levels of party unity and specialization (Andeweg and Thomassen 2011, 12). We make use of inter- and intra-party variation in the period 1994-2012.
