Foxes and Hedgehogs in Legislatures: Why Do Some MPs Become Policy Specialists and Others Generalists?

• Published date: 01 November 2023
• Author: Javier Martínez‐Cantó,Christian Breunig,Laura Chaqués‐Bonafont
• Date: 01 November 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12412

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LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 48, 4, November 2023

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12412

JAVIER MARTÍNEZ- CANTÓ

University of Konstanz

CHRISTIAN BREUNIG

University of Konstanz

LAURA CHAQUÉS- BONAFONT

Universitat de Barcelona,

Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals

Foxes and Hedgehogs in Legislatures:

Why Do Some MPs Become Policy

Specialists and Others Generalists?

Which legislators become specialized in particular policy areas (hedge-

hogs), and which develop into policy generalists (foxes)? Instead of focusing

on the individual characteristics of MPs, we build on institutionalist literature

and argue that an MP’s specialization arises from an interaction between MP

and parliamentary leadership. These interactions generate demand for policy

generalists depending on a leadership position, committee membership, gov-

ernment status, and parliamentary group size. Policy specialization is meas-

ured by how many different topics a legislator addresses in Parliament. Using

data from Germany from 1998 to 2013, topic- coded parliamentary questions

are combined with MPs’ personal and partisan data. Descriptively, foxes are

common in Germany and dominate in Parliament. The subsequent estimation

indicates that policy specialists are related to government status and parlia-

mentary group size.

When entering Parliament, legislators face a series of deci-

sions about how to spend their time and resources within the

chamber and thereby define their legislative style. Using Isaiah

Berlin’s metaphor, we can distinguish between two types of MPs:

foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes are generalists who participate in

political debates about many issues. As to say, they “know many

little things.” Conversely, hedgehogs “know one big thing.”

© 2022 The Authors. Legislative Studies Quarterly published by Wiley

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870 Javier Martínez-Cantó et al.

These MPs speak only about a narrow set of topics on which

they presumably have a high degree of knowledge. Knowing to

what extent legislators could be classified as foxes or hedgehogs,

and which factors drive such decisions, will help us to better

understand the current challenges of democratic governance. In

a context of increasing governance complexity, legislators face

a dilemma. On the one hand, they need to gain deep knowledge

on certain issues to effectively inform the lawmaking process.

Parliaments and parties rely on the specialization of legislators,

so they can become “cue- givers” and guide their fellow members

in a certain policy area. On the other hand, MPs need to know

about many policy areas to ensure public deliberation and ap-

propriately represent the interests of increasingly diverse elec-

toral constituencies.

Under which conditions do MPs become foxes or hedge-

hogs? We propose that individual specialization is a function of

the personal interests of the politicians who run for office and the

collective electoral interest of a given political party (Carey and

Shugart1995; Cox 1987; Fiorina1977). Members of Parliament

(MPs) must make decisions about their work in the house to main-

tain their reelection chances. At the same time, parties act as cru-

cial gatekeepers of the most desired parliamentary activities (Cox

and McCubbins2007; Strøm1997). In this context, MPs and par-

liamentary leadership are jointly responsible for developing legis-

lative foxes and hedgehogs.

MPs’ policy portfolios have been studied in the context

of the US House of Representatives and Senate (Baumgartner

and Jones1993; Bernhard and Sulkin2018; Curry2015), where

the incentive structure for legislators to comply with the col-

lective electoral interest of the party is far lower than in other

advanced democracies (Saalfeld and Strøm2014; Strøm1997).

This article contributes to the existing literature by studying the

formation of legislators’ policy portfolios under different insti-

tutional constraints. Besides the innate psychological inclina-

tions of each person (Tetlock1984), traditional explanations of

policy specialization within Parliament have focused on prepar-

liamentary career factors (Bernhard, Sewell, and Sulkin2017;

Bernhard and Sulkin 2018) or strategic considerations of

a legislator in anticipation of future actions (Victor 2011).

Other authors argue that individual MPs’ capacity to take