Parliamentary Elites in Central and Eastern Europe: Recruitment and Representation. Review in West European Politics (2015)

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Parliamentary Elites in Central and Eastern Europe: Recruitment and Representation Mihail Chiru

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Central European University Published online: 21 Jul 2015.

Click for updates To cite this article: Mihail Chiru (2015) Parliamentary Elites in Central and Eastern Europe: Recruitment and Representation, West European Politics, 38:6, 1357-1358, DOI: 10.1080/01402382.2015.1065065 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2015.1065065

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power of the purse, this argument finds no reflection in the chapter on legislatures and public finance and other chapters that explicitly deal with the power of the legislature. Obviously, these are minor quibbles, as the interested reader will probably draw these links and consider their implications. Thus, both the editors and contributors of this handbook can be applauded for having brought together an impressive set of contributions giving an exhaustive overview of the field of legislative studies.

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Simon Hug Université de Genève http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2015.1065067

Parliamentary Elites in Central and Eastern Europe: Recruitment and Representation Edited by Elena Semenova, Michael Edinger and Heinrich Best Routledge, New York, 2014, 322 pp., $140, ISBN 978-0-415-84346-1 (hbk) This book is a must-read for scholars interested in legislative affairs in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The 11 case studies written by country specialists on the recruitment patterns of parliamentarians in Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia and Ukraine come together with an introduction setting the theoretical framework and a final comparative chapter. The latter discusses regional differences and country-specific patterns and assesses the degree of convergence with the dominant models of elite recruitment in Western Europe. The volume draws on a uniquely rich dataset, looking at the CEE parliaments from the beginning of the transition until roughly before the economic crisis (and longer for some chapters). Analysing biographies of Members of Parliament (MPs), the authors coded a large number of socio-demographic (ethnic background, age, gender, occupational and educational background) and political career variables related to the MPs’ past political experience in public or party office, before and after 1989. In some chapters, the biographical data was supplemented with data from MP surveys. Great emphasis is put on legislative professionalisation, understood as the development of a pool of experienced legislators (‘core group of MPs’) adopting specific political standards and routines. Moreover, recruitment patterns are compared across party families and the chapters also present and discuss data on phenomena such as parachutism and party switching. As a positive externality the book is useful for understanding the divides that shape party politics in the analysed countries. Two distinct career paths emerge from the CEE data: one route implies experience in local politics while the other refers to holding a party leadership position. Of the regional differences worth mentioning, the case studies on former post-Soviet parliaments emphasise the destabilising role of businessmen elected as MPs. They are often recruited without prior political experience, for their ability to contribute to party finance, and are primarily interested in fostering their business interests. Their presence is associated with weaker parties and less parliamentary professionalisation. The main explanations advanced for the varying recruitment patterns and degrees of professionalisation are institutional. Thus, electoral and party volatility seem major factors preventing the professionalisation of parliamentary elites; important roles are also played by electoral reforms and executive–legislative conflicts. In terms of methods the volume relies heavily on descriptive statistics, with the exception of one chapter using bivariate correlations. Most of the time averages are presented without tests of statistical significance.

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1358 Book Reviews One of the limitations of the volume is that it says very little on the actual recruitment practices within parties concerning formal (i.e. party statute rules) vs. informal procedures and the degree of inclusiveness and centralisation of selectorates. Thus, potentially important explanatory factors suggested by the legislative recruitment scholarship are left out of the picture. Using the average number of served terms as an indicator for the stability of parliamentary elites is misleading, particularly since some of the parliaments in the region have not suffered dissolutions and early elections (e.g. Hungary, Romania) while others have experienced multiple such events (e.g. Poland, Latvia). Using the average number of years in Parliament would have been more appropriate. One might also question whether professionalisation as defined in the volume is really something consequential. Are core MPs more likely to acquire high parliamentary office? In other words, does seniority matter? The Lithuanian analysis says not (p. 163). Furthermore, are core MPs more likely to specialise on certain policy issues, or to develop expertise? Unfortunately, the issue of policy specialisation is not investigated in the volume. Despite these limitations, the volume significantly advances our knowledge of parliamentary elites in young democracies and our understanding of CEE legislative politics. Mihail Chiru Central European University http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2015.1065065

Representing the People: A Survey Among Members of Statewide and Substate Parliaments Edited by Kris Deschouwer and Sam Depauw Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014, 288 pp., £55.00, ISBN 978-0-19-968453-3 (hbk) Against today’s backdrop of challenges and criticism for the model of representative democracy, this edited volume asks how legislators choose to fulfil and interpret their role as representatives of the people. In an effort to test potential explanations, the authors use an original survey in which over 2,000 legislators from 73 national and sub-national parliaments in 14 European countries and Israel have responded to 45 carefully designed questions. This comprehensive dataset allows the contributors to explore a wide array of topics, including the representation of particular social groups by Members of Parliament (MPs) as well as their chosen methods (Chapters 2, 3, 4), personal vote incentives for MPs (Chapter 5), party loyalty and its various components (Chapter 6), inter-party relations on the MP level (Chapter 7), legislators’ constituency focus (Chapter 8), their interaction with the media (Chapter 9), and their career patterns and movements within multilevel systems (Chapter 10). What unites all these chapters is the recurring finding that institutions – especially parties, electoral systems and the regional level of parliament – hold significant explanatory value as to how MPs choose to fulfil their roles as representatives (pp. 16, 229). The contributors must be praised for undertaking extensive collection of survey data over a large number of parliaments. The geographical scope of the dataset provides significant variation in institutional settings while its depth in terms of survey questions serves as an extremely useful base for identifying, in a comparative framework, MPs’ behavioural patterns and choices in ways that were previously difficult to access. The broad array of topics addressed is further testimony of the usefulness of such data and, despite this wide focus, the flow of the volume is maintained through a careful