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

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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.