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The timing of this essay is
fortuitous given the recent publication of Gamm and Huber’s (2002) review of
the legislative literature. They confirm
what many already suspected: the mainstream legislative literature remains
obsessed with the modern U.S. House. Of course, the House remains an
interesting institution to study. Yet, as Gamm and Huber argue, this narrow
focus comes at a cost, and I believe this cost is particularly acute in the
study of representation. Legislative
representation is inextricably linked with electoral context, something that
varies very little in Congress (or even across
One dimension of representation
in which I am interested is the way legislators define, interact, and service
their constituents. This literature is probably best exemplified by Richard
Fenno’s (1978) Homestyle: House Members
in Their Districts. Fenno’s insights, coupled with the rise of the
incumbency effect (Mayhew 1974), helped spawn a massive literature on U.S.
House incumbents’ constituency efforts.
To be sure, scholars have addressed these issues in other legislatures,
including those outside the U.S. Donald Searing’s (1994) Westminster’s World: Understanding Political Roles is perhaps best
known. Yet, with few exceptions this
literature addresses a single nation at a time and, for the most part, it
considers only legislators elected from single-member districts. Exceptions to these limitations include Cain,
Ferejohn, and Fiorina (1987), Ingall and Crisp (2001), and Wood and Young
(1997). In addition, theoretical articles by Carey and Shugart (1995) and Strøm
(1997) speak to comparisons of different systems.
This lack of truly comparative
work motivated Valerie Heitshusen, David Wood, and myself
to embark on a five-nation, six-chamber study.
Over the last several years we interviewed 254 Members of Parliament in
the Australian House and Senate, the British House of Commons, the Canadian
House, the Irish Dail, and the New
Zealand House. In addition, we surveyed
hundreds of parliamentary staffers in the five
countries. Our reasons for choosing these nations should be rather
obvious. They offer a wide range of
electoral systems with fairly limited cultural variation.
We chiefly interviewed MPs in
their respective parliaments; in some cases we visited constituency offices
and, in two cases, spent extensive time with MPs as they worked their district.
Our interviews included a range of structured and open-ended questions about
MPs’ preferences, role orientations, nature and frequency of travel, the
quantity and quality of casework, amount of party work, perceptions of
constituency, and perceptions of their personal vote, among other things. Staff
surveys more directly measured levels of constituency casework demand and MP
and staff attention to district matters. Our ongoing work uses this data to
examine the determinants of MP constituency attentiveness both across and
within the chambers. Initial results point to the importance of electoral
safety, other party or parliamentary responsibilities, seniority, and ease of
servicing the district. (See, e.g., Heitshusen, Young, and Wood 2002.) In this
essay, I simply offer a few summary observations from our work thus far.
Constituency Work:
Past and Present
Across the board MPs are doing a
lot of constituency work. In their own way, especially in the allocation of
personal time towards interaction with constituents, many MPs exceed levels for
U.S. House members. Those who have them
work their district, electorate, riding, or state virtually every weekend of
the year, and for most of the full duration of their recesses. Of course, there is substantial variation within
and across chambers. This variation is largely driven by the strategic context
MPs face, such as reelection concerns, but it seems also affected by demand
factors, personal preferences, and chamber and party norms. As one extremely
safe London-based Labour MP put it “…it’s part of the job description….if I was
looking…at [constituency work] in terms of returns…it wouldn’t be worth it.”
Furthermore, in every country,
all indications suggest that levels of constituency effort are increasing. For example, if we compare our results on New
Zealand single-member district MPs with Anagnoson’s (1983) results from the
early 1980s, we see a substantial increase in both the amount of constituency
work these district MPs now perform, and a substantial increase in their
resources for doing so, such as constituency offices and staff. Especially in regard to casework, constituent
expectations have increased over time.
Working the
Constituency or Working the Party?
Much of the work on
legislator-constituency interaction makes little distinction between activities
that are constituency-related, but have little direct partisan content, versus
activities that are directed towards constituents who are members of the MP’s
party. For studies of U.S. House members this distinction may not be too
important. However, in strong party
systems, such as the five we study, this distinction is important (Studlar and
McAllister 1996). There is a difference between an MP traveling home to attend
party branch meetings and fundraisers, and an MP traveling home to hold a
surgery open to all constituents. They
are qualitatively different activities carried out in response to different
stimuli. For example, we found that MPs whose reelection most relied upon party
re-selection, e.g., Australian Senators, did far more party-oriented
constituency work than other MPs.
Treating all constituency work the same misses such a distinction.
New Zealand’s Transition to MMP
Reform has yielded a mixed
blessing. Many political scientists,
myself included, advocate hybrid electoral rules, where the benefits of
single-member districts combine with the benefits of proportionality. A number
of countries have adopted such rules in recent years. New Zealand’s
Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP) system is a prominent example; discussions
about something resembling MMP are ongoing in the U.K. In New Zealand, we saw a fascinating and
frustrating mix of discovery and conflict.
MMP generated the emergence of new parties and induced aggressive
cultivation and representation of groups largely ignored previously, such as
New Zealand’s Asian community. At the
same time, MMP brought confusion, scorn, conflict, and to a degree, redundancy.
The press and most analysts
focused on the problems brought about by the transition from majority to
coalition governance in Parliament. At the constituency level, all was not
smooth sailing either. We saw the largely ephemeral problem of the new list MPs
struggling to design roles for themselves. Many MPs who previously represented
districts now found themselves elected from the list. Some found the transition
liberating, adjusting quickly to their new role. Others found the transition
impossibly difficult. Their whole sense of being a legislator was based on
representing a geographically defined constituency as the MP. Despite being elected from a list, these MPs simply kept
serving the constituents from their old district and then, for the most part,
planned to retire.
District MPs and constituents
alike viewed the list MPs as inferior to district MPs (Ward 1998). This and
other incentives sometimes created “dueling” MPs at the district level. List
MPs would set up constituency offices in a district and advertise their
casework services to constituents. Needless to say, this irritated the district
MPs who perceived the list MPs – often accurately – as attempting to build a
base for contesting the district election.
A final potential impact of this
reform relates to party leadership.
Largely freed from the casework commands of a district, list MPs, not
surprisingly, expend more time and effort on party-based activities. Will this give list MPs an advantage for
leadership positions? Many district MPs
thought so. One conversation we had with an MP can be paraphrased roughly,
“While I am back in my district doing casework and talking to school groups,
list MPs in my party are in Wellington working on policy and building up party
chits.”
Representation
Requires a Constituency
To conclude, I will bring this
essay back to the theoretical nub of representation. Consider Pitkin’s (1967: 209) oft-quoted
definition of substantive representation: “… representing here means acting in
the interests of the represented, in a manner responsive to them.” Central in
this definition is the idea of the represented: the constituents. It is well known that ascertaining the
interests of the represented is a complex problem from both theoretical and
more practical political perspectives.
What is striking from our research, however, is how very little we know
about how representatives define the represented in the first place (let alone
ascertain their interests). What we saw
was an exceptional amount of fluidity in our MPs’ definition of constituency. SMD
MPs articulated perceptions of constituency not dissimilar to Fenno’s (1978)
concentric circles. Yet even here the range is marked. For MPs representing
multi-member districts – those from Ireland, New Zealand, and the Australian
Senate – the fluidity is exceptional. Some saw their constituency as
party-focused, some saw it as geographic, some saw it as representing a
particular policy interest, and some saw it as given population sector (such as
Asians or rural voters). From a
normative perspective, this diversity is not necessarily a bad thing. But from
an empirical perspective, fluidity in the very nature of what is meant by “the
represented” posits enormous challenges in understanding basic political
questions, such as the motivations behind policy positions and constituency
attentiveness, as well as representation generally.
References
Anagnoson, J. Theodore. 1983. ”Home Style in New Zealand.”
Legislative Studies Quarterly 8:
157-175.
Cain, Bruce, John Ferejohn, and Morris Fiorina. 1987. The Personal Vote: Constituency Service and
Electoral Independence. Cambridge, MA., and London: Harvard University
Press.
Carey, John and Matthew Shugart. 1995. “Incentives to
Cultivate a Personal Vote: A Rank Ordering of Electoral Formulas.” Electoral Studies 14: 417-439.
Fenno, Richard. 1978. Home
Style: House Members in Their Districts.
Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company.
Gamm, Gerald and John Huber. 2002. “Legislatures As
Political Institutions: Beyond the Contemporary Congress,” in Political Science: State of the Discipline,
ed. Ira Katznelson and Helen V. Milner. New York: Norton.
Heitshusen, Valerie, Garry Young, and David M. Wood. 2002.
“Electoral Context and MP Constituency Focus in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New
Zealand, and the U.K.” Revised version of the paper delivered at the 2002
American Political Science Association, Boston, MA.
Ingall, Rachel and Brian Crisp. 2001. “Determinants of
Home Style: The Many Incentives for Going Home in Colombia.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 26:
487-512.
Mayhew, David. 1974. “Congressional Elections: The Case of
the Vanishing Marginals.” Polity 6:
295-317.
Pitkin, Hanna. 1967. The
Concept of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Searing, Donald D. 1994. Westminster's World: Understanding Political Roles. Cambridge, MA,
and London: Harvard University Press.
Strøm, Kaare. 1997. “Rules, Reasons, and Routines:
Legislative Roles in Parliamentary Democracies.” Journal of Legislative Studies 3: 155-174.
Studlar, Donley, and Ian McAllister. 1996. “Constituency
Activity and Representational Roles among Australian Legislators.” Journal of Politics 58:69-90.
Ward, Leigh. 1998. “’Second-Class MPs’? New Zealand’s
Adaptation to MMP.” Political Science
49: 125-152.
Wood, David M. and Garry Young. 1997. “Constituency
Activity by Junior Legislators in Britain and Ireland: A Comparison.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 22:
217-232.