https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2071-3943
![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
A substantial literature demonstrates that in advanced democracies the public generally prefer for MPs to be focused on their constituencies. However, prior research fails to prove that the general public is aware when MPs are doing so, and whether their views of the MP change correspondingly. I test this using a high-quality proxy for constituency focus – talking about the constituency in the House of Commons – linking this to British Election Study survey data on perceived constituency focus and trust. I show that ‘real' constituency focus strongly predicts perceived constituency focus and also predicts trust. As expected, these effects exist only for constituents who know (recall) their MP's name. While previous studies argue that the public want ‘workhorses' who offer ‘value for money’ by speaking in Parliament, I instead suggest that the focus, not the volume, of activity can be a more productive route for MPs to develop trust.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Professor Edward Fieldhouse, Professor Maria Sobolewska and Dr Rosalind Shorrocks for their advice and encouragement with the manuscript. Thanks are also due to TheyWorkForYou and Hansard At Huddersfield for providing easy-to-use access to Parliamentary data. Matthew Somerville at TWFY and Fransina Stradling at Hansard At Huddersfield deserve particular credit for their help with using their tools.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributor
Lawrence McKay is a PhD candidate in politics at the University of Manchester. His research concerns how people perceive the quality of representation at a local level, including contextual determinants and the activities of representatives themselves. He also works with the Westminster-based democracy charity the Hansard Society, studying public discontent and engagement with politics.
ORCID
Lawrence McKay http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2071-3943
Notes
1 The Hansard at Huddersfield tool calculates the relative frequency with which a word is used in the Commons (per million words). URL: https://hansard.hud.ac.uk/site/site.php (Last accessed 24/04/2019).
2 Specifically, I do not count as a ‘constituency mention’ incidences where the ‘constituen*’ string is preceded by ‘their’, ‘his’, ‘her’, ‘your’ or ‘our’.
3 It is true that Kellermann and Martin do not find such a relationship, but Kellermann provides a credible explanation for this: they use written questions for the measure of constituency focus, not debate contributions. Given the constraints on speaking in the House, they argue that MPs will be more strategic and electorally focused in how they use their time.
4 Northern Ireland (NI) excluded, as are non-NI MPs who did not serve for the entire 2010–2015 period, for instance, having won or lost their constituency in a by-election.
5 Readers may also be curious about how constituency focus differs between parties. In surveys, Labour and Lib Dem MPs claim to be more locally-focused than Conservative MPs (Rush & Giddings, Citation2011), and Kellermann finds that Labour MPs’ parliamentary questions were more locally focused, though Searing (Citation1994, p. 125) cautions that it is ‘unusual to find large partisan differences in parliamentary roles’. In this dataset, as measured at the median, Labour MPs emerge as slightly higher in focus than Conservatives and Liberal Democrat MPs. The result for Liberals is perhaps unexpected, but it is possible that in this period they were less constituency focussed and more ‘policy-seeking’ (Searing, Citation1994) because the coalition presented a rare opportunity to achieve policy aims.
6 A ‘Don’t Know’ category was also available to respondents for both dependent variables.