Personalised Representation in a Weak and Party-Controlled Legislature: Policy Responsiveness in the French Parliament
| DOI | 10.1177/14789299211007987 |
| Published date | 01 August 2021 |
| Author | Corentin Poyet |
| Date | 01 August 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue: The Electoral Connection Revisited: Personal Vote-Seeking Efforts in the Era of Political Personalization |
https://doi.org/10.1177/14789299211007987
Political Studies Review
2021, Vol. 19(3) 393 –409
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/14789299211007987
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Personalised Representation in
a Weak and Party-Controlled
Legislature: Policy
Responsiveness in the
French Parliament
Corentin Poyet
Abstract
There is growing interest in personal representation and policy responsiveness in the European
literature. The current scholarship mainly focuses on strong legislatures. This article aims to
contribute to the discussion about policy responsiveness by investigating the least likely case,
France. It asks whether French MPs engage in policy responsiveness, and if they do, how
responsiveness interacts with party agenda and electoral vulnerability. Drawing on written
parliamentary questions asked by French MPs from 1997 to 2007 (N = 1172), the article shows
that MPs’ behaviour is strongly affected by their district features. Moreover, the article shows that
party agenda conditions the impact of district features. MPs are more likely to engage in policy
responsiveness when the issue is also essential for the party. In other words, policy responsiveness
is not independent of the party agenda. The article thus contributes to a better understanding of
the personalisation of political representation and its relationship with political parties.
Keywords
parliament, France, party, policy responsiveness, decentralised representation
Accepted: 15 March 2021
Introduction
In Europe, personal or dyadic linkages between MPs and constituents are traditionally
considered a reaction to growing electoral volatility and the decreasing role of parties as
primary agents of preference aggregation (Mair, 2013). These changes have received
extensive attention, and the exploration of the behaviour of MPs has a rich literature.
The literature acknowledges that MPs are primarily driven by their wish to remain in
office (Mayhew, 1974) and will act to achieve this goal. Although policy responsiveness
Faculty of Management and Business, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland
Corresponding author:
Corentin Poyet, Faculty of Management and Business, Tampere University, Kanslerinrinne 1, 33014
Tampere, Finland.
Email: corentin.poyet@tuni.fi
1007987PSW0010.1177/14789299211007987Political Studies ReviewPoyet
research-article2021
Special Issue Article
394 Political Studies Review 19(3)
is only one strategy MPs apply to pursue this goal, it is also one of the most important
(Papp, 2020). Eulau and Karps (1977) define policy responsiveness as the representa-
tives’ willingness to respond to the public’s policy preferences to enhance the electoral
connection. The importance of policy responsiveness is particularly true when the elec-
toral system offers voters the opportunity to select specific candidates. When voters can
only choose between lists, MPs behave in a more party-centred way. Moreover, scholars
also show that the magnitude of the electoral competition affects the propensity to
engage in policy responsiveness. The most vulnerable MPs are more likely to engage in
activities that may improve their vote-share, and policy responsiveness is no exception
(Ashworth and Bueno de Mesquita, 2008; Dropp and Peskowitz, 2012). While most of
the literature investigating policy responsiveness focuses on the references to local enti-
ties in MPs’ behaviour (Martin, 2011; Zittel et al., 2019), this article aims to measure the
policy focus of MPs (Soroka et al., 2009). This approach has received significant interest
in the literature (Baumann, 2016; Borghetto et al., 2020; Däubler, 2020; Papp, 2020),
with authors highlighting the impact of local socio-economic contexts on the issues MPs
raised in parliament.
There is nevertheless an inherent gap in the burgeoning literature. Most research on the
topic focuses on countries with moderately strong to powerful parliaments according to
the Weighted Legislative Powers Score (Chernykh et al., 2017). Here, we focus on policy
responsiveness in France, where the lower house of the parliament is one of the weakest
among Western democracies (Chernykh et al., 2017). The executive dominates political
life since the powers of the parliament in the law-making process remain relatively weak.
This subordinate position is coupled with extreme party discipline (Sauger, 2009). In
addition, the Constitution stipulates that MPs must represent the general interest (Costa
and Kerrouche, 2009b). The context ought to provide MPs with little incentive to engage
in policy responsiveness. However, at the same time, the electoral system provides French
MPs with strong incentives to cultivate personal votes (Brouard et al., 2013; Brouard and
Kerrouche, 2014). Previous literature has shown that the association between the weak-
ness of the parliament and the electoral system explains why French MPs spend a signifi-
cant share of their time in their district (Costa and Poyet, 2016; Gabriel et al., 2018).
Nevertheless, recent literature has shown that despite the lack of incentives from the
political institutions and party-dominated legislatures, MPs may engage in policy respon-
siveness (Borghetto et al., 2020; Carroll and Nalepa, 2020; Louwerse and Otjes, 2016).
Similar trends towards decentralised personalisation have been recently observed in
France (Costa and Poyet, 2016; François and Navarro, 2020), and unlike the seminal
works (Converse and Pierce, 1986; Cayrol et al., 1973), the literature displays some evi-
dence of an inclusion of district demands into the legislative work (Poyet and Siefken,
2018). These developments thus justify a study about district-oriented policy responsive-
ness – aspect that has been neglected by the literature. The questions addressed in this
article are therefore the following: Do MPs in a weak and party-centred legislature engage
in policy responsiveness? How do party agenda and electoral vulnerability affect the scale
of attention to local issues?
To answer these questions, we measured the share of attention MPs dedicated to issues
salient to their district. To do so, we used the number of written parliamentary questions
on agriculture. We focused on parliamentary questions because they are one of the single
forms of parliamentary activity that offer MPs the opportunity to formally and freely
advance their agenda and to obtain a reaction from the government (Wiberg and Koura,
1994). Besides, there is no limitation on the number of written questions an MP can
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