Electoral Incentives and Constituency Responsiveness. A Field Experiment in the Context of the Swiss Elections 2015

Responding to constituency requests is a direct mean for politicians to get in contact with their constituency and thus to signal responsiveness. In this paper, we contend that electoral incentives structure how much politicians engage in constituency work and test this proposition both at the individual level (electoral prospect of candidates) and at the context level (variation in district magnitude). We present evidence from a field experiment conducted with Swiss candidates during the National Council elections in 2015. The results indicate that the overall response rate is rather high but with significant variation according to our theoretical expectations. Candidates with a promising electoral position are more likely to answer and candidates from small electoral district have also a higher probability to engage in constituency work.