Parliamentary Careers in Comparison

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Philip Manow
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2016 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 285126458

With the research project ¿Parliamentary Careers in Comparison¿ we propose to carry out an encompassing analysis of parliamentary candidates and parliamentarians and their activities in Switzerland and Germany as of 1949 until today. While parliamentary career research has often been rather descriptive, i.e. theoretically underspecified, confined to single countries, and/or non-dynamic, we aim to investigate biographical and behavioural data of parliamentary candidates and parliamentarians with partly novel tools (such as sequence analysis, see below) and over long periods of time in order to obtain a fuller picture of parliamentary careers. Why is this of importance? Elections are the quintessential ¿instrument of democracy¿ (Powell, 2000). Running as a candidate, being endorsed by a party and then elected by voters, and subsequently re-running, being re-¿nominated and re-elected ¿ or not ¿ constitutes the most basic mechanism that secures political responsiveness and accountability in a representative democracy (Manin et al., 1999); see Figure 1, below. Within the party group the control of party leaders over the nomination process is also the most powerful tool to secure party discipline ¿ and is therefore one of the most important elements in the emergence of responsible government (Carey and Shugart, 1995, Cox, 1987a). Yet, despite the centrality of the delegation chains between voters and representatives and representatives and party group leaders we still lack a systematic, individual-level and dynamic understanding of the process of democratic delegation ¿ and we therefore also lack in-depth information on how political careers impact parliamentary behaviour. This is partly explained by the scarcity of available data ¿ in particular on episodes anterior and posterior to a parliamentary career. The project at hand aims to provide the collection and analysis of these data for two exemplary and in many respect similar cases, Switzerland and Germany, over a long period of time, and the subsequent analysis of this data with respect to career dynamics, representative roles, parliamentary behaviour, democratic accountability and conformity with the party line.(...)The project aims to provide a comprehensive and dynamic picture of the causes, courses and consequences of parliamentary careers in Switzerland and Germany. These two countries provide useful cases for comparison since they are both federalist but offer variation in important factors such as degree of parliamentary professionalization and differing power of national parties.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Switzerland
• Co-Investigators: Professorin Dr. Stefanie Bailer; Professor Dr. Simon Hug