Introduction: Political representation in France and Germany

This book is about political representation in France and Germany. It explores and compares what French and German Members of Parliament (MPs) think about representation and their roles as representatives, how they organize their interactions with the electorate at the district level and how citizens perceive and assess the quality of the representation process in these two large West European democracies. These issues deserve scholarly interest for several reasons. The questions as to whether, to what degree and in what respect the elected MPs perceive themselves as representatives of the political community, and what a “good representative” should look like in the eyes of the citizens, are at the core of normative theories of representative democracy. However, as already shown in Hanna Pitkin’s (1967) pioneering work, representation is not an uncontested concept, and questions concerning the quality of representation have not only been addressed by many works on theories of democracy, but have also received attention in a plethora of empirical research