Politicians and Voters on How Representatives Should Spend Their Time

• In Event: Beyond the Mean: New Directions in Elite Behaviour and Political Representation

Abstract

Politicians’ most precious resource is time. Elected representatives face daily tradeoffs about how to allocate their time: should they read a policy briefing to prepare for an upcoming legislative vote? Should they assist individual constituents with difficult casework files or rather meet experts and scientist? And do citizens have similar ideas how their delegates should allocate their time? Would they prefer representatives who listen to them instead of pushing their policy goals in parliament or networking with party members? A shared understanding about representatives’ work is desirable from a democratic point of view because we assume that voters will have more trust in parliamentarians when citizens and elected elites have similar understandings about the roles and tasks of their representatives. Our purpose in this study is to analyze time congruence – the degree to which representatives and citizens agree or disagree how parliamentarians should spend their time. We suggest time congruence as a novel way to look at representation and employ a novel time-allocation vignette in surveys of both elected politicians and voters in six countries to show for which activities time congruence exists and in which activities politicians and citizens disagree most strongly. Hence, this study provides a descriptive analysis of time congruence between representatives and voters and an analysis of how these choices vary by country, party and government/opposition status.

Authors

• Stefanie Bailer, University of Basel

• Christian Breunig, University of Konstanz