ORA (Round 5)The Nature of Political Representation in Times of Dealignment

西欧选民与政党之间日益增长的心理疏离为这项拟议研究提供了一个背景。这一趋势可以通过一些具体的发展来表明，例如政党认同水平的下降，持续投票给同一政党的选民人数的减少，以及对政党的信任的减少（Dalton and Wattenberg 2000; Dalton 2016; maair 2013）。这些发展逐渐累积到这样一种情况，即政治代表权不再是通过不同的国家政党和不同的国家选民联盟之间的长期稳定关系来构建的。无党派选民的崛起提出了一个紧迫的问题，即如何在未来几十年维持反应迅速的民主治理。在整个20世纪的西欧，党派关系是连接公民和国家的关键机制，我们必须质疑，在没有党派关系的21世纪，如何维持一个反应迅速的民主政府。个体化（二元）政治代表理论为提出的研究提供了第二个背景。关于这个问题的概念性工作将个别议员描绘成连接公民和国家的潜在机制。它描绘了个性化的表现形式，作为欧洲风格集体主义表现的关键选择。理想情况下，后者被认为是将选民的全国联盟与国家纪律政党配对，而前者则被认为是不同选民和个人代表之间的二元关系，这可能会显著影响选民对民主进程的满意度（Esaiasson et al. 2017; Karvonen 2010; Colomer 2011）。关于这一问题的实证研究强调了非欧洲制度的相关证据，如美国的案例，其中个别立法者确实在很大程度上构建了代表过程，其中立法者个人与选民之间的直接互动是预期和频繁的，并且大多数政治被认为是地方性的（Powell 2004； Uslaner和Zittel 2006）。从这两个背景出发，拟议的研究询问了在欧洲背景下，二元代表在多大程度上为党派代表机制提供了可行的补充。

The growing psychological detachment of West European electorates from political parties provides one background of the proposed research. This trend is indicated by a number of specific developments such as decreasing levels of party identification, dwindling numbers of voters who continuously vote for one and the same party, and also decreasing trust in political parties (Dalton and Wattenberg 2000; Dalton 2016; Mair 2013). These developments progressively accumulate to a situation in which political representation is no longer structured through long-term stable attachments between distinct national political parties and distinct national coalitions of voters. The rise of non-partisan electorates raises pressing questions about ways to sustain responsive democratic governance in future decades. As partisanship was a key mechanism linking citizens and the state throughout the 20th century in Western Europe we must question how responsive democratic government be sustained in the 21st century in the absence of it.Theories of individualized (dyadic) political representation provide a second background to the proposed research. Conceptual work on this issue pictures individual MPs as a potential mechanism for connecting citizens and the state. It portrays individualized forms of representation as a key alternative to European style collectivist representation. While the latter ideally is assumed to pair national coalitions of voters with national disciplined parties, the former has been characterized as a dyadic relationship between distinct constituents and individual representatives that might significantly affect voter satisfaction with the democratic process (Esaiasson et al. 2017; Karvonen 2010; Colomer 2011). Empirical work on this issue stresses related evidence on non-European systems such as the US-American case, in which individual legislators indeed structure the representative process to significant degrees, in which direct interactions between individual legislators and constituents are expected and frequent, and in which most politics is said to be local (Powell 2004; Uslaner and Zittel 2006). Advancing from these two backgrounds, the proposed research asks about the extent to which dyadic representation provides a viable supplement to partisan mechanisms of representation in European contexts.