Friday saw a fascinating day-long seminar at Birkbeck college, on ‘MPs and their constituents in contemporary democracies’. There were nine formal papers:
- Nick Vivyan & Markus Wagner: House or Home? Constituent preferences over representative activities
- Rosie Campbell & Philip Cowley: Designing the perfect politician: exploring desirable candidate characteristics using hypothetical biographies and survey experiments
- Vincent Tiberj: Yes they can: An experimental approach to the eligibility of ethnic minority candidates in France
- Michael Marsh: Parish pump and the preferential vote in Ireland
- Jocelyn Evans and Kai Arzheimer: Living in the wrong part of town: voter-candidate distance effects in the 2013 English local elections
- Caitlin Milazzo: Attractiveness and candidate popularity
- Andy Eggers, Markus Wagner & Nick Vivyan: Partisanship and punishment for MP misconduct
- Wolfgang Müller & Marcelo Jenny: Who MPs think their principals are
- Rosie Campbell & Joni Lovenduski: What characterises a good MP? Public and Parliamentarians views compared
Amongst the many things you’d have learnt had you been there was that candidate attractiveness can be worth up to 2.3% in vote share (and this in proper grown up Westminster elections, not Mickey Mouse ones like Police Commissioners…); that British MPs basically spend their time doing the things that voters say they want them to do, and in roughly the right proportions; and that, out of an 18-country study, the country in which MPs were most likely to say that their primary representative role was to represent their constituents – as opposed to their party, or their country, or a particular social group – was Britain. That last finding was from the Müller and Jenny paper. One might quibble with the interpretation of this – MPs may say that, but do they mean it? – but even so it is still revealing as the thing that they think they must say. The country with the most party-centred representatives was Denmark; that with the most country-focussed was Estonia.