Parliamentary Careers in Comparison

通过“议会职业比较”研究项目，我们建议对1949年至今瑞士和德国的议会候选人和议员及其活动进行全面分析。虽然议会职业研究通常是描述性的，即理论上不明确，局限于单个国家，和/或非动态的，我们的目标是调查议会候选人和议员的传记和行为数据，部分新颖的工具（如序列分析，见下文），并在很长一段时间内，以获得议会职业的更全面的图景。为什么这很重要？选举是典型的“民主工具”（Powell, 2000）。作为候选人参选，得到政党的支持，然后由选民选举，随后再次参选，被重新提名和再次当选，或不连任，构成了代议制民主中确保政治响应和问责的最基本机制（Manin et al., 1999）；请参见下面的图1。在党组织内部，政党领导人对提名过程的控制也是确保党的纪律的最有力工具，因此也是责任政府出现的最重要因素之一（Carey and Shugart, 1995; Cox, 1987a）。然而，尽管选民和代表以及代表和党组领导人之间的授权链处于中心地位，我们仍然缺乏对民主授权过程的系统、个人层面和动态理解，因此我们也缺乏关于政治生涯如何影响议会行为的深入信息。这在一定程度上是由于现有数据的缺乏，尤其是关于议员生涯前后的数据。目前的项目旨在收集和分析瑞士和德国这两个在许多方面类似的典型案例在很长一段时间内的这些数据，并随后对这些数据进行职业动态、代表作用、议会行为、民主责任和符合党的路线等方面的分析。该项目旨在全面和动态地介绍瑞士和德国议员职业的起因、过程和后果。这两个国家提供了有用的比较案例，因为它们都是联邦制国家，但在议会专业化程度和国家政党权力不同等重要因素上存在差异。

With the research project ¿Parliamentary Careers in Comparison¿ we propose to carry out an encompassing analysis of parliamentary candidates and parliamentarians and their activities in Switzerland and Germany as of 1949 until today. While parliamentary career research has often been rather descriptive, i.e. theoretically underspecified, confined to single countries, and/or non-dynamic, we aim to investigate biographical and behavioural data of parliamentary candidates and parliamentarians with partly novel tools (such as sequence analysis, see below) and over long periods of time in order to obtain a fuller picture of parliamentary careers. Why is this of importance? Elections are the quintessential ¿instrument of democracy¿ (Powell, 2000). Running as a candidate, being endorsed by a party and then elected by voters, and subsequently re-running, being re-¿nominated and re-elected ¿ or not ¿ constitutes the most basic mechanism that secures political responsiveness and accountability in a representative democracy (Manin et al., 1999); see Figure 1, below. Within the party group the control of party leaders over the nomination process is also the most powerful tool to secure party discipline ¿ and is therefore one of the most important elements in the emergence of responsible government (Carey and Shugart, 1995, Cox, 1987a). Yet, despite the centrality of the delegation chains between voters and representatives and representatives and party group leaders we still lack a systematic, individual-level and dynamic understanding of the process of democratic delegation ¿ and we therefore also lack in-depth information on how political careers impact parliamentary behaviour. This is partly explained by the scarcity of available data ¿ in particular on episodes anterior and posterior to a parliamentary career. The project at hand aims to provide the collection and analysis of these data for two exemplary and in many respect similar cases, Switzerland and Germany, over a long period of time, and the subsequent analysis of this data with respect to career dynamics, representative roles, parliamentary behaviour, democratic accountability and conformity with the party line.(...)The project aims to provide a comprehensive and dynamic picture of the causes, courses and consequences of parliamentary careers in Switzerland and Germany. These two countries provide useful cases for comparison since they are both federalist but offer variation in important factors such as degree of parliamentary professionalization and differing power of national parties.