Does Individual Professionalization of Legislators Deteriorate Policy Representation?

The proposed paper investigates the tension between policy representation and individual professionalization. The responsible-party model of political representation assumes that parties offer competing candidates and competing policy stances between which citizens make meaningful choices. This mechanism is considered to effectuate substantial policy-congruence, since parties and individual legislators seek to be in accordance with their voters’ demands, unless they want to put their vote-shares and parliamentary seats at risk. These efforts include both adopting to the demands of their voters and transforming them. The competition for votes and seats takes place between parties and between individuals within parties. The incentive to minimize the risk of de-election is the central cause for policy-congruence. In contrast, if this risk is marginal, policy-congruence with voters becomes unlikely. This risk is minimized, if parties offer no competing choices (e.g. cartel parties) or if legislators maintain their seats independently of the electoral outcome. In this regard, political professionalization is considered structurally as the emergence of legislators (as the largest group of all politicians) as social group, whose members define the criteria of access to this group. This social closure transforms, for the insiders, the risk of de-election by an unpredictable electorate into predictable risks of de-selection according to the criteria of the internal selectorates. In the course of individual professionalization applicants become members of this group, which reduces their risk of de-selection and thus their incentive for seeking policy-congruence. This process holds on even after becoming insider resulting in different degrees of individual professionalization of legislators. The paper tests the hypothesis that the higher the degree of individual professionalization of legislators the lower their policy-congruence with their party-voters and the general population. The empirical basis is a large-scale survey among German legislators (N app. 1200) conducted in 2010 and a simultaneously population survey (N app. 2003).