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Rethinking Constituency Service: Electoral Institutions, Candidate Campaigns and Personal Vote in Hungary & Romania

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Rethinking Constituency Service: Electoral Institutions, Candidate Campaigns and Personal Vote in Hungary & Romania RETHINKING CONSTITUENCY SERVICE: ELECTORAL INSTITUTIONS, CANDIDATE CAMPAIGNS AND PERSONAL VOTE IN HUNGARY & ROMANIA By Mihail Chiru Submitted to Central European University Department of Political Science In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Supervisor: Zsolt Enyedi Budapest, Hungary September 2015 COPYRIGHT NOTICE The dissertation contains no material accepted for any other degree(s) at any other institution(s). The dissertation contains no material written and/ or published any other person, except where appropriate acknowledgment has been made in the form of bibliographical reference. Mihail Chiru, September 30, 2015 ii ABSTRACT 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. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation benefited enormously from the comments, suggestions and the constructive criticism of my supervisors, Zsolt Enyedi, Gabor Tóka and Carsten Schneider. I would like to thank especially Sergiu Gherghina, Shane Martin, Marina Popescu, Zsófia Papp, and Eszter Timar for their comments on earlier drafts of the dissertation. Zsófia Papp, Gabriella Ilonszki and Laurențiu Ștefan were extremely generous to grant me access to the Hungarian and Romanian parliamentary survey data sets and to the Hungarian parliamentary questions data set. I am grateful to Levente Littvay for his help with methodological issues, and particularly with the matching procedures. I would also like to express my appreciation to Marina Popescu for giving me the opportunity to work on a number of projects (Parlament Transparent, Openpolitics.ro, The Romanian Candidate Study) which were extremely useful for my data collection efforts and significantly improved the quality of this dissertation. I am also grateful to the participants at various academic events for their valuable feedback on chapters which I presented: The ECPR Summer School on Parliaments (2012, Lisbon), The ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops (Mainz, 2013); the EPSA Annual Conferences, (2014, Edinburgh; 2015 Vienna), the APSA Annual Meetings (2014, Washington; 2015, San Francisco). Valentina Dimulescu deserves a special mention not only for her excellent proofreading help but also for being particularly understanding and sympathetic with the struggles, soul-searching moments and long absences from home that marked my PhD life. Last but not least, this thesis is dedicated to my loving parents and my brother, who have believed in me and supported me unconditionally all these years. iv Table of Contents INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................... 1 I.1 What is new? ........................................................................................ 4 I.2 Case Selection ................................................................................... 11 I.3 Data and Methods .............................................................................. 17 I.4 Plan of the dissertation....................................................................... 19 CHAPTER 1: SURVEYING CONSTITUENCY SERVICE - A PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS OF SERVICE RESPONSIVENESS IN POST-COMMUNIST DEMOCRACIES ............. 21 1.1 Introduction ....................................................................................... 21 1.2 Literature Review and Hypotheses ................................................... 23 1.3 Research design ............................................................................... 29 1.4 Constituency service in Hungary ...................................................... 32 1.4.1 Validation .................................................................................... 34 1.5 Constituency service in Romania ...................................................... 36 1.5.1 Validation .................................................................................... 39 1.6 Conclusion ........................................................................................ 43 CHAPTER 2: PERSONALIZED CAMPAIGNING AND CONSTITUENCY SERVICE UNDER MIXED ELECTORAL RULES ................................................................ 45 2.1 Introduction ....................................................................................... 45 2.2 Theoretical framework ....................................................................... 47 2.3 Research design ............................................................................... 56 2.4 The content and partisan distribution of parliamentary questions .... 58 2.5 Campaign choices, logic of candidacy effects and the partisan dimension ................................................................................................ 64 2.6 Further interpretation of results and robustness checks ................... 70 2.7 Conclusion ........................................................................................ 73 CHAPTER 3: IMPROVING MPS’ RESPONSIVENESS THROUGH INSTITUTIONAL ENGINEERING? CONSTITUENCY SERVICE IN TWO ELECTORAL SYSTEMS ........ 75 3.2 What should we expect? ................................................................... 77 3.3 Research Design ............................................................................... 88 3.3.1 The operationalization of variables ............................................. 89 3.3.2 Methods ...................................................................................... 90 3.4 Constituency questions’ frequency, content and addressees under two electoral rules ................................................................................... 91 3.4.1 Constituency PQs and the time spent in the district – a brief validation exercise ................................................................................ 91 v 3.4.2 Using parliamentary questions for constituency service before and after the reform ..................................................................................... 92 3.4.3 Accounting for constituency question types: from allocation responsiveness to symbolic representation. ........................................ 96 3.4.4 Constituency questions’ addressees .......................................... 99 3.5 Multivariate analyses....................................................................... 100 3.5.1 Matching parliamentarians ........................................................ 100 3.5.2 Redistributive effects of the electoral reform ............................
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