Citizens and Representatives in France and Germany (CITREP)

The project is designed as a comparative study of the normative foundations, the perception and practice of political representation in France and Germany. In view of the poor state of comparative research between those countries in the respective domain, the project pursues descriptive as well as explanatory goals. The descriptive parts aim to outline similarities and differences in the patterns of representation. The explanatory parts will examine which sys-temic characteristics account for those differences and investigate the intra-systemic varia-tions in attitudes towards representation.
The project will integrate two approaches to the process of representation. One part is the study of behaviour, role orientations and attitudes of members of the French and German national parliaments. The focus will be on describing and explaining representatives behav-iour in the process of representation, their perception of representation and the interactions aimed at performing representative roles. This part of the project is based on participant ob-servation of the representatives in their electoral districts and qualitative, semi-structured interviews.
The second part of the project will deal with citizens attitudes towards representation. The focus here is on citizens normative ideas about representation, their evaluation of its practice in France and Germany, their feeling of being well-represented in the political process and their view on their own capacity to make their voices heard. The adequate method for an-swering these questions is a comparative representative survey of attitudes in the two coun-tries.