Styles of Political Representation: What Do Voters Expect?

Abstract

Until recently, voters’ views on the representational roles of MPs have been a largely unexplored field in the studies of political behaviour. With the exception of the work by Carman, and Mendez‐Lago & Martínez, the few existing studies have mainly been conducted in the US and are fairly dated. In this study, we are partly filling this gap by examining voters’ views on representational roles in the Finnish open‐list PR system with mandatory preferential voting, which is characterized by a strong degree of candidate centeredness. Based on the Finnish national election study 2007 (FSD2138, N = 1,422), we first analyse support for various representational styles most often discussed in the literature, i.e. resemblance, delegation and trustee model, and then account for it through the social and political background of the respondents. The results show that both the delegate and trustee styles of representation are almost equally popular. The support for the different styles of representation is connected to socio‐demographic factors and to some extent political integration and orientation. Based on our findings we argue that the Finnish context becomes particularly evident in the heavy investment placed by voters on individual representatives. Finally, more research in the field, and especially development of more nuanced survey instruments are required in order to fully account for the complex nature of citizens’ expectations of the representational relationship.