ICTlogy

Abstract:

This thesis is focused on studying the causes and consequences of political professionalisation, by analyzing empirically the cross-country differences. Despite the literature claiming that political professionalisation is the result of the enlargement of the population with voting rights and/or the increase of the size of their government. By studying the process of political professionalisation in European micro-states and some macro-states, I solved an existent indetermination problem about the effect of population and government size on both professionalisation dimensions, as well as, testing the political professionalisation consequences on representation. Hence, the first article shows that the variation in the degree of legislative professionalisation across countries is explained, above all, by the government size. In a second step, the analysis focuses on the individual professionalisation, which in contrast to the legislative professionalisation, the analysis underlines how population size is the determinant for the variation of politicians’ professionalissation across countries. The last part of the thesis concentrates on revisiting the influence of population size and political professionalisation on the descriptive and substantive representation. Interestingly, the results show how legislative professionalism and population size are determinants for the descriptive representation, while the existence of agency-problems is explained by the individual professionalisation.