The importance of personal vote intentions for the responsiveness of legislators: A field experiment

Abstract

Individual legislators can be important agents of political representation. However, this is contingent upon their responsiveness to constituency requests. To study this topic, an increasing number of studies use field experiments in which the researcher sends a standardized email to legislators on behalf of a constituent. In this paper, we report the results of an original field experiment of this genre with the members of the German Bundestag. Supplementing previous research, we explore whether constituency requests in which voters mention a personal vote intention (rather than a partisan vote intention) increase legislators’ responsiveness, and how this treatment relates to electoral system's incentives. We find that legislators treated with a personal vote intention were more likely to respond (67 per cent) and respond faster than those treated with a partisan vote intention (59 per cent). However, we also show that the treatment effect is moderated by electoral system incentives: it is larger for nominally‐elected legislators than for those elected via a party list. Our results suggest that electoral system's incentives matter for legislators’ responsiveness only when constituents explicitly signals an intention to cast a personal vote.

Does (Non-)Localness Affect MPs’ Levels of Responsiveness? Evidence from a UK Field Experiment

“…Given that we did not provide any address and there is a protocol that MPs respond only to their constituents, 7 we considered emails that asked for contact detailsan address or phone numberas a response (coded 1). 8 The response rate of 77.66 per cent 9 is high compared to audit experiments set in other European countries (Bol et al 2021;Breunig, Grossman, and Hänni 2022; Magni and Ponce de Leon 2021), but it is somewhat lower than the 91 per cent from the UK study by Habel and Birch (2019). 10 Among those MPs who responded, a majority asked for contact details (76.67 per cent), and 23.33 per cent of the MPs provided a substantive reply addressing the issue raised.…”

Loyal Activists? Party Socialization and Dissenting Voting Behavior in Parliament

“…Holding an executive or a parliamentary office likely increases the effectiveness of party discipline (e.g., Zittel and Nyhuis 2019). Second, behavioral differences between MPs elected in the district and on the party list are reported regarding their voting behavior (Sieberer 2010) but also regarding other activities like social media activity (Schürmann and Stier 2022) and MPs' responsiveness to constituency requests (Bol et al 2021). Most of the MPs without party socialization are elected via party list, according to Bailer et al's (2013) data.…”

Advocates of climate action? The age of members of parliament and their activity in legislative debates on climate change

“…On the basis of the office seeking motivation, the legislative behavior of parties on the one hand and their individual representatives on the other is usually explained as being strategic, whereby differences in these strategies are largely assumed to be rooted in the institutional level of politics like the electoral system (e.g., Bol et al 2021 ; Ohmura et al 2018 ; Zittel and Nyhuis 2021 ). However, contextual features such as issues that dominate the public agenda also matter for decision-making processes of parties and individual politicians (e.g., Hobolt and De Vries 2015 ; Meyer and Wagner 2016 ; Rovny and Whitefield 2019 ).…”