Bringing parliamentary role back in
Résumé
Hopefully, this volume has confirmed that roles are coming back into legislative studies. The studies included are highly diverse, but share the idea that in order to understand legislatures it is worth looking at how MPs see themselves, political representation and democracy. Roles are not distributed randomly; they can have their source in MPs’ backgrounds and positions. Roles are not merely individual beliefs and tastes, but articulate collective norms and values, which might have consequences on MPs’ behavior inside and outside the parliamentary chamber. In this concluding chapter, we first propose a distinction between legislative and representative roles on the current state of role research as presented in this book. This brings us to the second section, in which we elaborate on the difficult issue regarding behavior and roles. This is followed by a third section on the equally significant question of human rationality and the role concept. The last sections deal with the emerging research agenda on parliamentary roles and the contemporary and future state of representative roles in advanced democracies.