Political Ambition and Constituent Service: Does Ambition Influence How Local Officials Respond to Electoral and Non-Electoral Service Requests?

Theoretically, political ambitions paired with elections generate more responsive elected officials. In this paper, we test whether the progressive political ambitions of public officials affect whether and how they respond to their constituents by conducting a experimental audit study where local public officials receive both an electorally related service request and a generic service request. We combine their responses (or non-responses) with data from a survey of these public officials conducted months prior about their political ambition in seeking higher office. On the whole, we find that politically ambitious officials are not more responsive to electorally oriented service requests and that there are not systematic differences in the content of the responses of ambitious and non-ambitious elected officials. In areas of constituency service, ambition does not seem to affect representational behavior, regardless of whether the service requests are electorally related or not.

Going Local: Parliamentary Questions as a Means of Territorial Representation in the Italian Parliament

Parliamentary questions are often employed by Members of Parliament to demonstrate their responsiveness to the needs of the constituency. This article takes advantage from this opportunity to study the determinants shaping the constituency focus of Italian deputies. Previous research has shown that the degree to which Members of Parliament devote attention to their geographical district depends on several factors related to electoral incentives, demands coming from citizens and taste-based preferences. By studying the behaviour of Italian deputies elected in three legislative terms with a system giving few incentives to perform constituency service, this article offers new evidence that non-electoral reasons are important to shape the role played by Members of Parliament.

Does Changing Electoral Systems Affect (Corrupt) Particularistic Exchanges? Evidence from the Italian Case

The literature on forms of particularism explores the impact of institutional variables on what is denoted, alternatively, as constituency service, pork-barrel politics, or corruption. Attention has mostly been given to electoral systems, but other institutional provisions and political factors, such as party strength, are also relevant. The present contribution investigates the likely effects of electoral reforms on corruption control and seeks confirmation of the hypothesis that single member plurality (even within mixed member) systems are conducive to a type of particularism that might help fight corruption, taking Italy as a case. We test the impact of two electoral reforms and three electoral systems enacted in Italy between 1996 and 2016, whose primary aim was bolstering enfeebled party leaderships and facilitating the formation of durable governments, and we compare the effort at corruption control of the Italian governments born under these different electoral systems with those of other European democracies.

Do More Professionalized Legislatures Discriminate Less? The Role of Staffers in Constituency Service

Research suggests that organizational structure can influence the ability of actors to discriminate. In this research note, we examine whether the structure of state legislatures affects observed discrimination in correspondent audit studies. We find that increased legislative professionalization is associated with reduced discrimination against racial minorities. By analyzing thousands of emails collected in a prior study, we find that legislative professionalization is related to a higher likelihood that staffers respond to email contacts and staffers are less likely to discriminate against racial minorities across multiple measures of discrimination. Our findings emphasize the importance of substantively relevant heterogeneity in audit studies and identify a potential mitigator of discrimination—legislative professionalism. Our results also highlight the importance of staffers in representation and the legislative process.

Gender Differences in Legislator Responsiveness

A growing body of research shows that women legislators outperform their male counterparts in the legislative arena, but scholars have yet to examine whether this pattern emerges in non-policy aspects of representation. We conducted an audit study of 6,000 U.S. state legislators to analyze whether women outperform or underperform men on constituency service in light of the extra effort they spend on policy. We find that women are more likely to respond to constituent requests than men, even after accounting for their heightened level of policy activity. Female legislators are the most responsive in conservative districts, where women may see the barriers to their election as especially high. We then demonstrate that our findings are not a function of staff responsiveness, legislator ideology, or responsiveness to female constituents or gender issues. The results provide additional evidence that women perform better than their male counterparts across a range of representational activities.

Which Politicians Respond?

Chapter 9 expands on analyses of the field experiment to explore additional variation in the characteristics of politicians’ responsiveness. First, it investigates the degree to which politicians’ responses reflect state- and individual-level characteristics that may be associated with incentives to cultivate a personal vote. These analyses highlight, in particular, that—consistent with the theoretical discussion in Chapter 4 and existing work on the personal vote—electoral politics play a key role in affecting the degree to which politicians attempt to build their individual reputations via provision of assistance to individual constituents. Chapters 8 and 9 therefore collectively explore the conditions under which constituency service does and does not occur.

Clients and Constituents

This book provides a theoretical and empirical examination of constituency service in developing countries. The predominant view of distributive politics in “patronage democracies” emphasizes the partisan targeting of pork and clientelism. In contrast, this book demonstrates that high-level legislators in India and other contexts often provide direct, nonpartisan assistance to individual constituents. Under what conditions do they provide constituency service, rather than engage in partisan bias? The book shows that the uneven character of access to services at the local level—often because of biased allocation on the part of local intermediaries—generates demand for help from higher-level officials, and also creates incentives for those politicians to bypass intermediaries by providing direct assistance. It draws on elite and citizen surveys, interviews, qualitative shadowing, and experiments to explore the dynamics of both the demand for constituency service and its supply. The book’s findings highlight the potential for an underappreciated form of democratic accountability, one that is however rooted in the character of patronage-based politics.

Constituency Service in Comparative Perspective

Chapter 11 considers the extent to which we should expect to observe similar dynamics of distributive politics in other parts of the world. It draws on a range of cross-national data to show that the contextual characteristics supporting constituency service—the dynamics of patronage democracy, difficulty in access to public benefits, and partisan allocation of benefits at local levels, accompanied by the presence of high-level representatives with little ability to monitor individual electoral behavior—coexist across a range of democracies around the world. It offers evidence to suggest that high-level politicians in countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America also engage in individual-level distribution to build a personal vote, rather than support for their party, and that highly partisan distribution by local operatives may ironically heighten their incentives to assist constituents in a nonpartisan manner. Thus, India is an exemplar of a common trend, rather than a global outlier.