House or Home? Constituent preferences over legislator effort allocation

Vivyan, Nick; Wagner, Markus

Abstract

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.

Citation

Vivyan, N., & Wagner, M. (2016). House or Home? Constituent preferences over legislator effort allocation. European Journal of Political Research, 55(1), 81-99. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12119

• 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