Parliamentary Roles in Modern Legislatures

Olivier Rozenberg is Associate Research Professor at Sciences Po (Paris) where he works in the Centre d'études européennes. Magnus Blomgren is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Political Science at Umeå University, Sweden.

'The idea that legislators have, and understand themselves to have, many roles was central to early behavioral studies of legislatures, but fell out of favor with recognition that the initial models were overly simplistic. With this volume, Rozenberg, Blomgren and their colleagues return a sophisticated understanding of legislative roles to center stage. The book not only demonstrates the power of the concept of legislative roles in understanding legislative behavior, but also sets an important agenda for the future research.' - Richard Katz, Johns Hopkins University'Historically, the study of legislative roles has been one of the most productive fields in empirical research on parliaments and legislatures. After great advances during the 1950s and 1960s, the new institutionalism in its sociological variety has contributed to a renewed interest in the role orientations of parliamentarians. Magnus Blomgren and Olivier Rozenberg have assembled a number of very distinguished scholars from Europe and the US to explore the potential of legislative role analysis half a century after its first great advances. The resulting volume is an outstanding and original contribution to the field of legislative studies. Based on very rich empirical material across a large number of countries and the European Parliament, the authors demonstrate that the study of legislative roles is highly relevant to a modern analysis of legislative behavior and offers profound theoretical insights into the motivations and strategies of Members of Parliament.' - Thomas Saalfeld, University of Bamberg…the editors and contributors have produced a publication of a remarkable quality that advances theory and empirical analysis legislative roles. I'm not sure that trying to reconcile, such as publishers seek to do so, the theories proposed roles respectively Searing and Strøm is essential or even useful (although calls to erase differences between different theoretical schools seem to have become the paradigm dominant in political science). In fact, alternative theoretical proposals, Navarro as does seem more successful than trying to reconcile theories which are based on areas (psychology and economics) and postulates very different. - Sébastien Lazardeux, St. John Fischer College, Rochester (NY)

• 1. Introduction Magnus Blomgren & Olivier Rozenberg 2. Legislative Roles and Legislative studies – The neo-institutionalist turning point? Magnus Blomgren & Olivier Rozenberg 3. The Emergence and Transformation of Representative Roles Heinrich Best & Lars Vogel 4. The Consequences of Representatives’ Role Orientations: attitudes, behaviour, perceptions Rudy Andeweg 5. Roles as strategies: Towards a logic of legislative behavior Kaare Strøm 6. Legislators and their Representational Roles: Strategic Choices or Habits of the Heart? Thomas Zittel 7. Party Dimensions of Representation in Westminster Parliaments: Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom Anika Gauja 8. Parliamentary roles of MPs in sharp and soft focus: Interviews and behavioral record compared Marcelo Jenny & Wolfgang C. Müller 9. Role Stability in the context of institutional and positional change Gabriella Ilonszki 10. The cognitive rationality of role choices: evidences from the European Parliament Julien Navarro 11. Conclusion Oliver Rozenberg & Magnus Blomgren