Vivyan, Nick and Wagner, Markus (2016) 'House or Home? Constituent preferences over legislator effort allocation.', European journal of political research., 55 (1). pp. 81-99.
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.
Item Type: | Article |
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Keywords: | Conjoint analysis, Constituency service, Effort allocation, Home styles, Instrumental reasoning. |
Full text: | (AM) Accepted Manuscript Download PDF (2654Kb) |
Status: | Peer-reviewed |
Publisher Web site: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12119 |
Publisher statement: | This is the accepted version of the following article: Vivyan, Nick and Wagner, Markus (2015), House or home? Constituent preferences over legislator effort allocation. European Journal of Political Research, 55(1): 81-99, which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12119. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance With Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving. |
Date accepted: | 02 September 2015 |
Date deposited: | 11 September 2015 |
Date of first online publication: | 18 October 2015 |
Date first made open access: | 18 October 2017 |
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