Constituency Service Research Articles

Concluding Remarks: Constituency Service or Constituency Effort?

In the Introduction to this symposium, we posed three inter-related questions. First, what do Nordic parliamentarians do to serve the needs and represent the interests of their constituents? Second...

Reflection on Political Representation

Abstract This article compares how Members of Parliament in the United Kingdom and Ireland reflect on constituency service as an aspect of political representation. It differs from existing research on the constituency role of mps in two regards. First, it approaches the question from a sociological viewpoint that emphasizes the process character of role-taking and its need for validation by others. Second, instead of relying on interviews and surveys it analyses how mps refer to aspects of constituency work in parliamentary debate. This choice of empirical material opens up a long-term view on reflections of constituency service that either validate or question understandings of the constituency role. Although mps in both countries are heavily engaged in constituency work, the analysis reveals important differences in this regard, with Irish mps recurrently criticizing their own role in the constituency, while British mps unequivocally see it in a positive light.

Extra-parliamentary behaviour in Northern Ireland: MLAs and constituency service

ABSTRACTLittle is known about the attitudes and behaviour of Northern Ireland’s subnational legislators (Members of the Legislative Assembly, or MLAs) beyond their activities at Parliament Buildings, Stormont. This article provides the first analysis of MLAs’ extra-parliamentary behaviour through a mixed-methods study of their constituency service. The study finds that MLAs attach considerable importance to constituency service, devoting more time to its provision than to parliamentary duties. Noticeable variation exists between and within parties in terms of constituency service effort, although unionist MLAs tend to have a stronger constituency focus than non-unionist MLAs. Variation in constituency service effort at the individual level has more to do with MLAs’ role orientations than electoral incentives. In terms of their home style, MLAs exhibit local behaviour that is more characteristic of their contemporaries in the Republic of Ireland than their counterparts in the rest of the United Kingdom.

Exercising control and gathering information: the functions of interpellations in Hungary (1990–2014)

ABSTRACTThe article investigates the factors shaping the number and content of interpellations, a form of parliamentary questions by members of parliament (MPs) in post-regime change Hungary. Four theoretical propositions regarding the functions of interpellations are examined in this context: political control; policy-oriented information seeking; parliamentary group leadership; and constituency service. A new database of 4096 observations for the period between 1990 and 2014 is compiled in order to analyse these hypotheses. Computer-assisted content analysis techniques and count data regressions are used to describe the text of interpellations in terms of their geographical and policy content. Results show that opposition MPs interpellate more, whereas representatives of single-member districts and regional lists interpellate less than their peers. Representatives from single-member districts and regional lists make more reference to local issues in general, but not to their own district or county. Finally, policy specialisation increases the likelihood of submitting pertinent parliamentary questions.

Elite Political Ignorance: Law, Data, and the Representation of (Mis)Perceived Electorates

It is common to think of political elites—candidates, legislators, party officials, and campaign advisers—as specialists in learning the preferences of voters. But recent studies find that political elites believe public opinion within legislative districts to be more conservative than it actually is, and that extreme candidates are more electable than moderates (despite compelling evidence to the contrary). Campaign staffers overestimate their candidate’s electoral prospects. Moreover, natural and researcher-designed experiments show that informing legislators about constituency preferences changes roll-call votes, as legislators recalibrate to better represent public opinion in their districts. This Article introduces the problem of elite political ignorance to the legal- academic literature. We review political science findings on elite (mis)perceptions of voter preferences, and we explore the likely benefits and costs of reducing elite political ignorance. The immediate impacts would probably include better alignment between the roll-call votes of representatives and the policy preferences of their constituents; reduced political polarization; less racial discrimination by campaigns and representatives; and lower-cost enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. However, over time, a reduction in elite ignorance could also engender more severe and enduring partisan gerrymanders; greater political and demographic skew in the population of regular voters; more inequity in the provision of constituent services; and microtargeted campaigns that slowly erode democracy-sustaining norms and belief structures in the public. We argue that most of the benefits of reduced political ignorance could be realized without incurring such costs if elites acquired better information about the distribution of voter preferences within districts, without learning the preferences of identifiable individuals. To this end, we propose that states (1) reduce the amount of political information in the official voter file, (2) adopt rules that make it somewhat more cumbersome for social media companies to develop and market political profiles of their users, and (3) enact campaign-finance voucher programs subject to an unusual disclosure rule, under which the state would conceal voucher-donor identities from the recipient and the general public, while revealing geocoded voucher-contribution histories.

Hiding behind the party brand or currying favor with constituents: Why do representatives engage in different types of constituency-oriented behavior?

Why do representatives prioritize certain types of constituency service in parliamentary systems? This study argues that the choice for constituency-oriented activities is conditioned by both partisan factors and legislative role orientations. Two novel data sets combining behavioral and attitudinal measures of constituency-oriented behavior are used for empirical tests: an elite survey including detailed interviews with 204 members of the Turkish parliament and 4000 parliamentary questions tabled by these members. The results from a series of ordered logit, ordinary least squares (OLS), and negative binomial regression estimations confirm that members of parliament choose different types of constituency-oriented activities based on their visibility to the party leadership and their constituency. This choice is primarily driven by partisanship and members of parliament’s perceptions about the influence of party leader in renomination. The analysis provides important insights about the role of partisan factors as drivers of parliamentary behavior.

Constituency Service under Nondemocratic Rule: Evidence from China

Why do nondemocratic regimes provide constituency service? This study develops theory based on a national field audit of China’s “Mayor’s Mailbox,” an institution that allows citizens to contact local political officials. Analyzing government responses to over 1,200 realistic appeals from putative citizens, we find that local service institutions in China are comparably responsive to similar institutions in democracies. Two key predictors of institutional quality are economic modernization and the intensity of local social conflict. We explain these findings by proposing a demand-driven theory of nondemocratic constituency service; in order to sustain the informational benefits of citizen participation, the responsiveness of service institutions must increase with citizen demand. We then offer supplementary evidence for this theory by analyzing the content of real letters from citizens to local officials in China.

Cheap Talk or Proper Signaling? Styles of Campaigning and Engagement in Constituency Service

ObjectivesAlthough a salient component of parliamentary delegation and accountability chains, the connection between individual campaigning and parliamentary behavior has not been measured systematically by empirical research. This study assesses the importance of campaign strategies and activities for constituency service.MethodsWe draw on an original data set combining the responses of 234 members of Parliament (MPs) participating at the 2010 Hungarian Candidate Study with their subsequent parliamentary questions. We content analyzed the questions and ran negative binomial regressions to evaluate if and how campaign activities influenced the MPs to introduce locally‐oriented questions.ResultsOur analyses show that a form of campaign socialization, the time devoted to meet local activists during campaigns, is a key predictor for the likelihood of introducing constituency questions, whereas campaign norms and messages matter less.ConclusionsUltimately, even though campaigns matter for constituency service, the MPs’ shadowing behavior, their socialization in local politics, and their partisan affiliation is likely to matter more.

What Explains Low Female Political Representation? Evidence from Survey Experiments in Japan

Few democratic countries have lower rates of female political representation than Japan, making it an excellent place to seek clues for female underrepresentation. We were surprised to find, based on three experimental surveys, that Japanese voters do not harbor particularly negative attitudes toward female politicians. The problem instead appears to be that women are reluctant to run for office because of socially mandated family roles. An implication of our study is that gender equality in Japanese politics will likely founder – especially in countries with electoral systems that require around-the-clock constituency service and legislative work – until voters no longer have gendered expectations about who performs time-consuming family work.

Blueprint Flow: A Declarative Service Composition Framework for Cloud Applications

Cloud applications provides users with services that can be accessed on demand through the Internet. Fertile service frameworks are considered one of the most critical ingredients for the envisaged benefits so as to further interactions among cloud computing resources and application components. Such foundations should lead to the proliferation of new innovative services and applications. The research community has been exploring the Open Service Gateway initiative’s (OSGi) potential as a top candidate for cloud application platforms. Although the current OSGi specification provides some level of support for dynamic service discovery, tracking, and composition, more should be done to be able to adequately address the need for diverse interaction patterns for cloud applications. This paper introduces a novel service framework built upon OSGi platforms that supports a directed-acyclic-graph style composition of constituent services. Given a declarative blueprint of service interconnections and interactions, the framework can find and assemble corresponding component services to form a real application. Our proposal can enable a realistic topology of service component interlinkings beyond linear chaining interactions as supported by the status quo. The design, implementation details, and validation results of our workflow-based service composition framework architecture are discussed in the paper.

Legislatures and Democratic Development in Africa

Abstract:Afrobarometer data collected three decades after Joel Barkan’s pioneering survey of rural Kenyans confirm his insights that voters stress MPs’ linkage roles in terms of representation (carrying views upward to the capital) and constituency service (bringing goods downward from national government) over their institutional roles (lawmaking and oversight). And, contrary to conventional wisdom, they prefer collective goods for the constituency over private goods. An African Legislatures Project survey of 822 MPs in seventeen countries revealed, however, that MPs misinterpret this as a demand for material goods and development and underappreciate the demand for representation, prompting—among other things—the adoption of controversial Constituency Development Funds.

Effect of holding office on the behavior of politicians

Reciprocity is central to our understanding of politics. Most political exchanges-whether they involve legislative vote trading, interbranch bargaining, constituent service, or even the corrupt exchange of public resources for private wealth-require reciprocity. But how does reciprocity arise? Do government officials learn reciprocity while holding office, or do recruitment and selection practices favor those who already adhere to a norm of reciprocity? We recruit Zambian politicians who narrowly won or lost a previous election to play behavioral games that provide a measure of reciprocity. This combination of regression discontinuity and experimental designs allows us to estimate the effect of holding office on behavior. We find that holding office increases adherence to the norm of reciprocity. This study identifies causal effects of holding office on politicians' behavior.

Explaining MPs’ constituency service in multilevel systems: the case of Belgium

Political representation – the core of modern democracies – essentially refers to a relationship between a representative and those represented by him or her. Therefore, the linkage between citizens and political decision makers is one of the most important topics in the study of democratic political systems. However, the literature on parliamentary systems has concentrated on what MPs do inside parliament on the one hand and on the impact of the electoral system on MPs’ behavior on the other hand. This aim of this article is twofold. First, it provides a more comprehensive description of the activities of Belgian MPs on the basis of a mixed-method approach, using data from a survey, interviews as well as field observations. Second, it addresses four other factors that could have an influence on MPs relations to the district, besides the electoral system: the level at which they are elected (regional vs. federal), the accumulation of mandates, the distinction between older and newer parties, and MPs seniority.

An adaptive plan-based approach to integrating semantic streams with remote RDF data

To satisfy a user’s complex requirements, Resource Description Framework (RDF) Stream Processing (RSP) systems envision the fusion of remote RDF data with semantic streams, using common data models to query semantic streams continuously. While streaming data are changing at a high rate and are pushed into RSP systems, the remote RDF data are retrieved from different remote sources. With the growth of SPARQL endpoints that provide access to remote RDF data, RSP systems can easily integrate the remote data with streams. Such integration provides new opportunities for mixing static (or quasi-static) data with streams on a large scale. However, the current RSP systems do not offer any optimisation for the integration. In this article, we present an adaptive plan-based approach to efficiently integrate sematic streams with the static data from a remote source. We create a query execution plan based on temporal constraints among constituent services for the timely acquisition of remote data. To predict the change of remote sources in real time, we propose an adaptive process of detecting a source update, forecasting the update in the future, deciding a new plan to obtain remote data and reacting to a new plan. We extend a SPARQL query with operators for describing the multiple strategies of the proposed adaptive process. Experimental results show that our approach is more efficient than the conventional RSP systems in distributed settings.

Members of the Scottish Parliament on Twitter: good constituency men (and women)?

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of Twitter by Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) for the provision of constituency-related information, or in support of their constituency service work.Design/methodology/approach– Content analysis of 10,411 tweets sent by the 105 MSPs on Twitter during four weeks in early-2014.Findings– While there was some evidence of MSPs on Twitter acting as a promoter of local community interests and as a conduit for information on local policy issues and events, their tweets were dominated by the wider, national, political agenda and by the Scottish independence debate. Compared with their online behaviour as parliamentary candidates three years earlier, MSPs placed an even greater emphasis on the one-way broadcast of information to their followers. They were reluctant to respond to contentious local policy questions, or to enter into any visible, meaningful, political debate with their constituents.Research limitations/implications– Although the research was conducted seven months before the Scottish independence referendum on 18 September 2014, the independence debate still dominated proceedings on Twitter. It might, therefore, be appropriate to revisit MSPs’ use of Twitter at some point during a truer “peacetime” period.Originality/value– This is the first systematic content analysis of tweets sent by all MSPs on Twitter. It allows the authors to compare their actual Twitter use with that envisaged by the Scottish Parliament, as a way of MSPs communicating about their work and engaging with their constituents.

Electoral control and the human capital of politicians

We develop a model of electoral control in which politicians in a legislative body allocate their time between providing constituency services to their voters, and pursuing the objectives of legislative cliques and factions. While a politician's human capital symmetrically increases his inherent ability to engage in both endeavors, our analysis uncovers an equilibrium bias towards the latter. As a result of the strategic interdependencies among legislators, a trade-off arises between politicians' human capital and voters' ability to exert electoral control. We characterize conditions under which an increase in the human capital of politicians makes voters worse off by encouraging all politicians to divert their attention away from their constituents.

Campaign Cost and Electoral Accountability

The increasing cost of political campaigns and its impact on the electoral process are issues of paramount importance in modern democracies. We propose a theory of electoral accountability in which candidates choose whether or not to commit to constituency service and whether or not to pay a campaign cost to advertise their platform. A higher campaign cost decreases voter welfare when partisan imbalance is low. However, when partisan imbalance is high, a higher campaign cost is associated with a higher expected level of constituency service. More costly campaigns can thus have a rebalancing effect that improves electoral accountability. We discuss the implications of our findings for campaign finance regulation and present empirical evidence consistent with our key predictions.

New pricing approaches for bundled payments: Leveraging clinical standards and regional variations to target avoidable utilization

ObjectivesDevelop pricing models for bundled payments that draw inputs from clinician-defined best practice standards and benchmarks set from regional variations in utilization. DataHealth care utilization and claims data for a cohort of incident Ontario ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke episodes. Episodes of care are created by linking incident stroke hospitalizations with subsequent health service utilization across multiple datasets. Study designCosts are estimated for episodes of care and constituent service components using setting-specific case mix methodologies and provincial fee schedules. Costs are estimated for five areas of potentially avoidable utilization, derived from best practice standards set by an expert panel of stroke clinicians. Alternative approaches for setting normative prices for stroke episodes are developed using measures of potentially avoidable utilization and benchmarks established by the best performing regions. Principal findingsThere are wide regional variations in the utilization of different health services within episodes of stroke care. Reconciling the best practice standards with regional utilization identifies significant amounts of potentially avoidable utilization. Normative pricing models for stroke episodes result in increasingly aggressive redistributions of funding. ConclusionsBundled payment pilots to date have been based on the costs of historical service patterns, which effectively ‘bake in’ unwarranted and inefficient variations in utilization. This study demonstrates the feasibility of novel clinically informed episode pricing approaches that leverage these variations to target reductions in potentially avoidable utilization.

E-Government Initiatives Case Study: New Models for Success

This case study examines the efforts of a mid-tier, cabinet-level state agency to transform its constituency services to be more effective using information technology. The agency, based in a rural Midwestern state, faced increased scrutiny to raise accuracy, lower wait times, decrease expenditures, increase constituency satisfaction, and expand services to the state. To meet these challenges, the agency conducted a series of meetings to determine best possible opportunities for change and decided that technology solutions, which supported their business vision of the future, would be the foundation for that change. Redesigning core organizational processes—using several technologies such as e-commerce, content management system, data warehousing, and mobile technologies—would revolutionize how the agency delivers these services to its constituency. Along the way, agency encountered several challenges such as staff turnover, leadership issues, outsourcing issues, and implementation issues. At the heart of their experience lie four theories: the technology adoption model, task–technology fit model, Delone–McLean model of information systems success, and Leavitt’s model of organizational change. This case will not only examine the academic issues surrounding the aforementioned theories, but will also discuss how the agency navigated through real-world issues to meet these challenges. By increasing the quality and quantity of information that governmental bodies provide “Joe Citizen,” our populations are able to have opportunities to be more self-sufficient and are able to hold our public trust more accountable and responsive to the needs of an ever-growing, ever-changing society at large.

Race and Responsiveness: An Experiment with South African Politicians

AbstractDo politicians engage in ethnic and racial favoritism when conducting constituency service? This article presents results from a replication field experiment with local South African politicians that tested for racial bias in responsiveness to requests about public goods provision. The experiment represents an adaptation of similar experiments conducted in the United States, extending the design to a different institutional environment, albeit one with a similar racially-charged history. Although one might suppose that politicians in South Africa would seek to avoid racial bias given the recent transition to full democracy, I find that South African politicians—both black and white—are more responsive to same-race constituents than to other-race constituents. Same-race bias is evident in both the dominant and the main opposition political parties. Moreover, politicians are not particularly responsive to anyone. Implications for the further study of democratic responsiveness are discussed.