Does Electoral Reform Change MPs’ Behavior? Evidence from Romania

Abstract

The article illustrates that legislators’ constituency orientation can be enhanced through electoral system personalization, even in political systems that have used the party-centered closed list proportional representation for several elections. Leveraging a quasi-natural experiment, created by the 2008 electoral reform in Romania, the study investigates the frequency and determinants of parliamentary questions dealing with constituency issues and whether the reform has stimulated different forms of responsiveness toward constituents. The analyses run on a matched sample of legislators show that while the reform has not modified the proportion of all constituency questions, it has increased substantially the share of questions inspired by allocation responsiveness. Moreover, the effects of some determinants of constituency orientation changed after the reform: previous socialization in local politics loses its significance while we also observe an increased negative effect of non-local candidatures.