How Members of
Parliament in Africa
Represent their
Constituencies
ABOUT
HOME tackles the following
research questions:
01
How do MPs behave in their home constituency?
02
How do MPs use the parliamentary floor to cater to districts’ interests?
03
How are recruitment and post-assignment in parliament used to connect with constituencies?
04
Which factors explain differences in constituency-focus?
The questions are investigated in the context of a Small-N comparative study including Ghana, Namibia and South Africa. These are three of the most established democracies in Africa, with remarkable records of free and fair elections and highly institutionalized party systems. However, they have important institutional and contextual differences that make the empirical analysis of constituency service relevant. The project applies an ambitious mixed methods research strategy that combines different types of quantitative (surveys, MPs’ biographies, parliamentary activity) and qualitative (documental research, interviews) data to answer the research questions and test different set of hypotheses.
PEOPLE
Coordination
Research team
Advisory board
Academic internship
Publications
2021
Book chapters
Sanches, E. R. & Dias, António (2021) Ghana: The Politics of Legislative Debates in a Hybrid Presidential Regime. In H. Bäck, M. Debus, & J. M. Fernandes (eds.), The Politics of Legislative Debate Around the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 399-419.
DATA
MPs Biographic
Datasets
The project will assemble country-level datasets featuring biographic background data of legislators in Ghana (since 1991), Namibia (since 1989) and South Africa (since 2014, due to data unavailability). The data collected includes age, gender, seniority, localness, committee experience, districts’ sociodemographic characteristics, inter alia.
Parliamentary
Activity Datasets
The project will create time-series datasets containing parliamentary speeches and questions, and their constituency focus over time. The data will include at least two of the case studies (South Africa and Ghana), for over twenty years.
Elite
Surveys
The project will create time-series datasets containing parliamentary speeches and questions, and their constituency focus over time. The data will include at least two of the case studies (South Africa and Ghana), for over twenty years.
