Rules, reasons and routines: Legislative roles in parliamentary democracies

Parliamentary roles, the behavioural patterns or routines that legislators adopt, can be viewed as strategies for the employment of scarce resources toward specific goals. This article argues that parliamentary behaviour can be understood against the background of four typical and largely hierarchically ordered objectives that parliamentarians have: reselection, re‐election, party office, and legislative office. Legislative roles describe the ways in which parliamentarians harness their scarce resources in order to reach their goals. These strategies are in turn affected by the institutional rules under which parliamentarians operate. The article examines the specific legislator objectives under parliamentary government and discusses the roles that describe the various ways in which they pursue these goals.