Political representation in European democracies is widely considered partisan and collectivist. This article, however, stresses that there is more to the representative process in European democracies than just its textbook version. It emphasizes the role of geographic representation as a complementary strategy in party‐dominated legislatures that is characterized by two distinct features. First, legislators employ distinct opportunities to participate in legislative contexts to signal attention to geographic constituents without disrupting party unity. Second, these activities are motivated by individual‐ and district‐level characteristics that supplement electoral‐system‐level sources of geographic representation. We empirically test and corroborate this argument for the German case on the basis of a content analysis of parliamentary questions in the 17th German Bundestag (2009–13). In this analysis, we show that higher levels of localness among legislators and higher levels of electoral volatility in districts result in increased geographic representation.

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Scholarly attention to the nature and extent of negative campaigning in nonmajoritarian multiparty systems is steadily growing. While prior studies have made commendable progress in outlining the conditions and consequences of negative campaigning, they have typically disregarded the complex interdependencies of multiactor communication environments. The present study focuses on network-structural determinants of negative campaigning. It does so by relying on unique data from the 2013 Austrian federal election and using exponential random graph models to investigate patterns of mediated negative campaigning. We find that—above and beyond common determinants of negative campaigning—indicators of network structure are important predictors of campaign communication. This suggests that network models are crucial for accurately representing campaign communication patterns in multiparty systems.

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