Council activity of Croatian and Slovenian local councilors

Zusammenfassung

Upon examining the effects of leadership control on the degree of councilors’ contacts with citizens, the present chapter turns to the second dimension of individual representative behavior, the activities of Croatian and Slovenian local councilors within their local councils. Both external and internal activities indicate individual representative behavior of local councilors and are expected to be constrained/facilitated by their local political group leaders. Nevertheless, the traditional ‘responsible party government (RPG)’ model regards council activities as far more consequential for the stability and survival of the government, while the networking activities are rarely brought up in studies of party unity and its consequences. Few, if any, authors made predictions on whether external or internal behavior would draw more attention of party leadership, but given the consequentiality of council activities as opposed to their networking activities, one can expect more elaborate monitoring of individual legislative activities. Led by such expectation, I suspect council activities to be a more stringent test for the theory proposed in the theoretical framework.