Is Local Really local? A New Approach to Measuring Constituency Orientation

• In Event: Public Opinion and Legislative Politics

Abstract

Many legislators face competing principals, needing to balance responsiveness to voters, party members and party leaders. Scholars have long used roll-call analysis to measure the degree to which legislators vote along party, personal or district lines. More recent research has begun to explore the rate of localism, by which we mean the degree to which a legislators is focused in district representation, in other forms of legislative behavior, including patterns of floor speeches. This paper suggests a new methodology to better capture the degree of district orientation in parliamentary debates. Specifically, our index of localism differentiates between in inherently local legislative behavior, behavior which frame wider policy questions in a local context and behavior which is in no way local. We apply the framework to an analysis of all parliamentary questions in the UK House of Commons during the May I Government. Our results suggest that existing approached to content analyzing legislative activity has significantly overestimated the degree of localism in the British House of Commons. The results help solve the puzzle as to why we would see localism in an electoral environment that is without a personal vote element. Localism, we find, is limited to a small number of legislators with a career-path focused on constituency service.

Authors

• Andres Dockendorff, University of Chile

• Shane Martin, University of Essex