Role Perceptions of Subnational Representatives in Unitary Countries

Paper proposal for consideration for Panel 2: Political Actors’ Behaviour in Sub-National Politics. One of the established findings in the literature is that elected representatives have different role perceptions and they may privilege representing their constituents/voters over representing their party, or vice versa. What is less known is which factors are driving representatives to lean towards their voters or to their party. We develop two sets of hypotheses. First, representatives who have strong subnational attachments and who come from a rural or peripheral jurisdiction are more likely to find it important to represent their constituents. Second, we theorize that the extent to which elected representatives are inclined to follow their voters instead of their party depends on the identarian and distributional consequences a policy or decision has on the constituency. Representatives will be more in line with their constituents when a policy concerns the local identity or welfare of their jurisdiction and when the benefits of a policy are likely to be shared by the whole nation while the costs are likely to be imposed on the jurisdiction of the representative. These hypotheses are tested through a survey experiment fielded to around 2,000 elected municipal and county representatives in Norway in February 2022. Respondents were asked to indicate their support for each policy in hypothetical scenarios whereby representatives randomly received one of the two treatments: their political party is against this policy but their constituents support it, or vice-versa. This question and the treatment were repeated for six policies, all of which concerned the building of a new infrastructure that vary on their identarian and distributional consequences for a jurisdiction: building of a new road, a new hospital, a new nursing home, a new museum about the history of their municipality/region, a new wind park, and a new waste recycling plant. The results support our hypotheses: representatives –and especially those with strong subnational attachments—are more inclined to deviate from their party when it concerns an infrastructure that concern the identity or welfare of the subnational jurisdiction (museum, hospital and nursing home). In addition, representatives –and especially those from rural and peripheral jurisdictions—are more inclined to deviate from their party when the costs are largely borne by the subnational jurisdiction (road, wind park, waste recycling plant). These findings are important because they reveal that role perceptions of representatives change depending on the decision/policy at hand as well as on the characteristics of the jurisdiction of a representative.