Individualized Political Representation and its Prerequisites

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This planned project empirically explores the role of campaign communication as a mechanism mediating between electoral institutions and legislators legislative behavior. It perceives incentives to represent local non-partisan constituencies in legislative contexts to originate from candidate-centered electoral systems and to being mediated by personalized campaign communication. As a consequence, parties that opt for personalized campaign strategies in order to win votes might facilitate individualistic forms of legislative behavior compared to collectivist ones. This project aims to empirically tests and corroborate this theoretical argument for the German case on the basis of an integrated set of data matching the campaign behavior of successful candidates in the 2009 German Federal Elections with their legislative behavior in the 17. German Bundestag. This new set of data draws from existing data collected in the context of the 2009 German Candidate Study and newly collected comprehensive data on the legislative behavior of successful candidates in 2009 (N=196). The German case provides a natural environment for a quasi-experimental design allowing for variance at the level of electoral incentives while keeping third variables constant.