CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Chiru, Mihail |
|---|---|
| Title | Rethinking Constituency Service: Electoral Institutions, Candidate Campaigns and Personal Vote in Hungary & Romania |
| Summary | This dissertation is a study of the determinants and electoral consequences of one individual accountability mechanism: constituency service. Previous studies exploring the variation in the intensity of constituency service have ignored what happens during the campaign, focusing either on the electoral vulnerability of the parliamentarian or on socialization effects. Similarly, the literature overlooked how changing institutional incentives for cultivating a personal vote - either wholesale electoral system reforms or changes in marginal electoral provisions - affect the MPs' engagement in constituency service. The dissertation analyzes for the first time the consequences that strategies and actions regarding the personalization of candidate campaigns and the local content of the campaign agendas have on the MPs' engagement in constituency representation. The study also investigates innovatively the impact that electoral reforms and changes in other personal vote incentives have on constituency service and on five types of responsiveness towards local interests. In doing so I draw on longitudinal behavioral and attitudinal data on parliamentarians from Romania and Hungary, two countries in which the incentives for cultivating a personal vote have changed in different directions in recent years and in which elections are marked by comparatively high campaign localization and personalization. I use content analysis to identify parliamentary questions dealing with constituency issues and to classify their topic, and I rely on a variety of multivariate regression models and on matching for inferential analyses. The first chapter identifies a differentiated impact of the type of seat on constituency service in Hungary and Romania, which can be interpreted as evidence that the degree of role specialization or contamination in mixed electoral systems depends on whether the proportional and the majoritarian channels of election are formally separated. Chapter 2 shows that even in a context where MPs are highly controlled by their parties (Hungary) the candidates' personal campaign strategies and activities matter considerably for engagement in constituency service. The campaign - legislative behavior connection is also corroborated by the findings of chapter 4, which suggest that localized campaigning is one of the most important predictors of constituency service in Romania. Chapter 3 indicates that the 2008 Romanian electoral reform has not modified the level of engagement in constituency service, but it has increased substantially casework and allocation responsiveness. Moreover, the effects of a number of determinants of constituency service changed after the electoral reform (e.g. socialization effects vanish after the reform). Chapter 5 shows that asking constituency questions mattered for the incumbents' vote shares at the most recent Romanian (2008 and 2012) and Hungarian elections (2014). The chapter argues that the electoral pay-offs of constituency service co-vary with the intensity of partisan evaluations and with the degree in which electoral system provisions enable citizens to sanction individual MPs. |
| Supervisor | Enyedi, Zsolt |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/chiru_mihail.pdf |
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