Periodic Reporting for period 2 - DEPART (The ‘de-party-politicization’ of Europe’s political elites. How the rise of technocrats and political outsiders transforms representative democracy.)
Berichtszeitraum: 2022-09-01 bis 2024-02-29
These developments pose a major challenge to European democracies, since representation and accountability have typically been ensured by political parties and their representatives in parliaments and governments. Yet when these institutions are increasingly made up of politicians with weaker ties to parties (or none at all, e.g. technocratic ministers), how can we still have responsive and accountable democratic politics?
The DEPART project will examine whether and how changing career patterns among political elites affect the policy outcomes that political systems produce and the way voters hold politicians accountable for their actions.
In addition to this massive effort, we have also started to examine how voters respond to the presence of ministers with varying ties to political parties (e.g. technocratic appointees to ministerial office). In a first study, we conducted survey-experimental work in Italy to study how voters attribute responsibility for (good or poor) government performance to ministers and political parties under different hypothetical scenarios. More such work will be conducted in the second half of the DEPART project.
We are also in the process of fielding a large-scale survey of political office-holders to anchor our understanding of what constitutes a ‘party insider’ (a central concept in our work) in real-world perceptions of politicians. This work will be used to inform our own approach to conceptualizing and measuring the party attachment of politicians based on our biographical data collection.
This will enable us to paint a much more detailed and comprehensive picture of the people who govern us than was possible in the past, while at the same time allowing for large-scale statistical analysis of the data.
Over the remainder of the project period, we will be using these data to tackle a number of important research questions: First, we will investigate how the role of political parties in the recruitment of government ministers has changed, and how this affects the representation of specific groups and interests in high political office. While research on representation is a well-established field in political science, our empirical approach will allow us to advance the field by capturing empirical complexity (e.g. changing affiliations to social classes over the life course) that empirical research has eschewed so far. Second, we will examine how the changing biographies of ministers affect policy outcomes, especially in the socio-economic realm. This will allow us to link research on unequal representation with the study of policy outcomes. Finally, we will study the impact of ministerial backgrounds on voting behavior – especially in voters’ attribution of responsibility for government performance to political parties. This work will deepen and advance our understanding of how politicians’ individual-level characteristics affect voting and how this relationship is shaped by political parties.