Professor Nick Vivyan nick.vivyan@durham.ac.uk
Professor
In many political systems legislators face a fundamental trade-off between allocating effort to constituency service and to national policy-making activities, respectively. How do voters want their elected representatives to solve this trade-off? This article provides new insights into this question by developing a conjoint analysis approach to estimating voters’ preferences over their legislator's effort allocation. This approach is applied in Britain, where it is found that effort allocation has a significant effect on voter evaluations of legislators, even in a political system where other legislator attributes – in particular, party affiliation – might be expected to predominate. This effect is nonlinear, with voters generally preferring a moderate balance of constituency and national policy work. Preferences over legislator effort allocation are not well-explained by self-interest or more broadly by instrumental considerations. They are, however, associated with voters’ local-cosmopolitan orientation, suggesting that heuristic reasoning based on underlying social dispositions may be more important in determining preferences over representative activities.
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Sep 2, 2015 |
Online Publication Date | Oct 18, 2015 |
Publication Date | Feb 1, 2016 |
Deposit Date | Sep 3, 2015 |
Publicly Available Date | Oct 18, 2017 |
Journal | European Journal of Political Research |
Print ISSN | 0304-4130 |
Electronic ISSN | 1475-6765 |
Publisher | Wiley |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 55 |
Issue | 1 |
Pages | 81-99 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12119 |
Keywords | Conjoint analysis, Constituency service, Effort allocation, Home styles, Instrumental reasoning. |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1403386 |
Accepted Journal Article
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Copyright Statement
This is the accepted version of the following article: Vivyan, Nick and Wagner, Markus (2015), House or home? Constituent preferences over legislator effort allocation. European Journal of Political Research, 55(1): 81-99, which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12119. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance With Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving.
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