From rules to roles, from locus to focus: A critical guide of five decades of (political) elite surveys and the study of political representation

Over the decades, the progressive expansion of elite surveys both in breadth and in depth ended up expanding the coverage of a wide array of issues through increasingly sophisticated designs. When it comes to the field of representation and its evolution in recent decades, however, the present knowledge on how the topic has been addressed over time has still to be properly charted. How do elite surveys contribute to the study of representation? What level of similarities and/or differences emerge between the various survey projects on the issue over the past decades? This paper tries to answer these questions by exploring whether and how the variety of dimensions of democratic representation, theorized by early studies and continuously improved upon, have indeed been effectively addressed through the utilisation of surveys. Given these premises, the paper presents a critical review of the various dimensions of representation and it assesses how they have been empirically explored by available elite surveys. By relying on thirty surveys administered to political representatives in twenty-nine democracies over the last five decades, we provide an overview on the ways in which political scientists examined how politicians (supposedly) reflect and act in the voter’s interest. To achieve our goal, our theoretical framework develops along two specific dimensions: a) the extent to which the various constitutionally guaranteed functions of parliamentarians have determined models that are sufficiently shared by representatives (from Rules to Roles); b) the different emphasis given to the territorial level compared to that of specific or general competencies (from Locus to Focus). Moreover, our paper presents a descriptive analysis of the number of items covering the various macro-dimensions of representation, as well as their geographical and temporal dimensions. The paper contributes to the literature highlighting the overall extent of knowledge gained through previous studies, including the strengths and the limitations of the approaches pursued so far on the attitudes of elected representatives. Last but not least, the paper contributes to the current efforts in combining and systematizing different data sources, thus, informing data harmonization of existing elite surveys.