The changing representation interface: democracy and direct contact with politicians

ABSTRACT

The interface between politicians and the electorate is a vital component of the infrastructure of democracy and politicians now have many more tools available to communicate and engage with the electorate. Direct contact between politicians and the electorate is associated with increased levels of civic engagement. In this article, we examine the responsiveness of politicians in the UK by conducting: (i) an innovative test of responses to an undecided voter's email and (ii) follow-up interviews with electoral candidates. We found that a majority of electoral candidates had an identifiable email address and more than half responded to our undecided voter's email. However, there were considerable differences in the content relevance of the responses. There were also very few follow-up emails or further contact from the electoral candidates, suggesting only limited evidence of an integrated communication strategy. Electoral candidates also expressed concerns about communicating in a way that was ‘on record’. The findings provide a unique insight into the dynamics of communication between politicians and the electorate and the changing nature of the representation interface. Whilst the Internet has the scope for more personalized and two-way communication and for electors to hold politicians to account, it seems that politicians are more focused on campaign advantage rather than renewing the representation interface.

KEYWORDS:

• Accountability
• democracy
• engagement
• representation
• responsiveness
• political party
• transparency
• vote

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the time of the electoral candidates who participated in this study. We hope that they find the research and evidence useful in their own roles.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In the UK, political parties in the run up to the 2010 General Election were reported as consulting the same communications agency as the Democrat Party campaign in the USA (Crabtree, 2010). In 2014, the UK Labour Party appointed a leading campaign figure from President Obama's team to support their 2015 General Election campaign.

2. Here, we exclude those 13 electoral candidates who had online contact forms as opposed to email addresses as it was not possible to track these replies in detail.

3. The Category 4 ‘Home address request’ relates to email responses where the candidate asked for confirmation that the elector lived in their constituency.