Does Electoral Reform Change MPs’ Behavior? Evidence from Romania
| Published date | 01 August 2021 |
| Date | 01 August 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/14789299211022565 |
| Author | Mihail Chiru |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue: The Electoral Connection Revisited: Personal Vote-Seeking Efforts in the Era of Political Personalization |
https://doi.org/10.1177/14789299211022565
Political Studies Review
2021, Vol. 19(3) 355 –375
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/14789299211022565
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Does Electoral Reform
Change MPs’ Behavior?
Evidence from Romania
Mihail Chiru
Abstract
The article illustrates that legislators’ constituency orientation can be enhanced through electoral
system personalization, even in political systems that have used the party-centered closed list
proportional representation for several elections. Leveraging a quasi-natural experiment, created
by the 2008 electoral reform in Romania, the study investigates the frequency and determinants of
parliamentary questions dealing with constituency issues and whether the reform has stimulated
different forms of responsiveness toward constituents. The analyses run on a matched sample
of legislators show that while the reform has not modified the proportion of all constituency
questions, it has increased substantially the share of questions inspired by allocation responsiveness.
Moreover, the effects of some determinants of constituency orientation changed after the reform:
previous socialization in local politics loses its significance while we also observe an increased
negative effect of non-local candidatures.
Keywords
electoral system, constituency service, personalization, Romania
Accepted: 17 May 2021
Introduction
The personalization of electoral systems via reforms that enable preference voting, lower
thresholds in flexible list systems or introduce single-member districts (SMDs) is a phe-
nomenon ever more present in both young and consolidated democracies (Renwick and
Pilet, 2016). Sometimes, these electoral changes are introduced specifically to improve
the representatives’ accountability toward their constituencies, but one cannot take for
granted that MP behavior would change accordingly, given the existence of other driving
forces like the preferences of party principals or the power of role socialization. This
article will assess the results of such a reform, while distinguishing between the types of
Russian and East European Studies, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford,
Oxford, UK
Corresponding author:
Mihail Chiru, Russian and East European Studies, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of
Oxford, 11 Bevington Road, Oxford OX2 6NB, UK.
Email: mihail.chiru@area.ox.ac.uk
1022565PSW0010.1177/14789299211022565Political Studies ReviewChiru
research-article2021
Special Issue Article
356 Political Studies Review 19(3)
responsiveness that are fostered in the process. The setting chosen displays the parame-
ters of a quasi-natural experiment. This within-country approach keeps constant many
institutional and political culture factors that could confound the analysis and hence
ensures a more robust estimation of the consequences of electoral reform than cross-
sectional studies (Blais et al., 2011; Crisp and Ingall, 2002; Motolinia, 2021).
In 2008, after five electoral cycles under closed list proportional representation (PR),
Romania switched to an original mixed-member proportional electoral system. In the PR
era, each of the 42 counties was a multimember district, with magnitude varying between
4 and 28. The reform meant that all MPs would be elected in SMDs: some after obtaining
an absolute majority of votes and others depending on the proportion of votes won by
their party in the county (Giugăl et al., 2017).1 The electoral system reform was specifi-
cally promoted in the media as an encouragement to vote for people not parties, in order
to increase individual accountability and the quality of MPs (Coman, 2013). Citizens
would finally have the chance to punish corrupt or lazy MPs that were previously pro-
tected by the closed electoral lists.
Moreover, focus groups organized at the time showed that citizens hoped the electoral
reform would strengthen the linkage between the representatives and their constituencies,
through two mechanisms. First, the MP would be obliged to keep more in touch with their
voters and, second, the electoral reform would facilitate the election of more local candi-
dates and fewer carpetbagger MPs, that is, politicians imposed by party leaders on eligi-
ble positions in counties they had no connection with (Badescu et al., 2008).
Given these aspects, the research question of the article is: “Can electoral reform
strengthen legislators’ constituency orientation even after a party-centered closed list PR
system has been in place for several cycles?” It tests whether the reform increased the
overall engagement in constituency service or whether it had a differential effect on types
of constituency-oriented responsiveness (e.g. casework, allocation responsiveness, organ-
ized interest representation). In addition, I explore changes in the main determinants
behind constituency service orientation under the two electoral laws. The former can be
understood as direct effects of the reform, while the latter as indirect or redistributive
effects. Through its focus, the article contributes directly to the literature on decentralized
personalization (Balmas et al., 2014) by assessing the effects of an institutional personali-
zation reform on legislators’ behavior.
The introduction is followed by a review of the literature on electoral rules and legisla-
tive behavior and a discussion of the study’s hypotheses. The research design introduces
the data, the variables’ operationalization and the methods. The third section analyzes the
frequency and types of constituency questions asked in the two periods. Next, I discuss
the findings of the multivariate analyses performed separately on the matched data and on
all MPs to assess the direct and redistributive effects of the reform. The conclusion
reviews the findings and points to further directions of research.
Electoral Rules and Legislative Behavior
A wide range of political science studies evaluate the extent to which the variation in elec-
toral rules explains the variation in legislators’ behavior. Thus, scholars have analyzed how
electoral systems affect parliamentary voting unity (Carey, 2007; Depauw and Martin,
2008; Kam, 2009), party switching (Klein, 2018), MPs’ engagement in legislative speeches
(Proksch and Slapin, 2012), or their choice of committees (Riera and Cantú, 2018). Another
substantive part of this literature concentrates on the incentives that electoral systems create
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