The Missing Link? Parliamentary Work, Citizens’ Awareness and Votes in French Legislative Elections

The quality of representation in contemporary democracies is closely linked to who the parliamentarians are, their preferences and their behaviours. However, the capacity of the parliamentarians to connect to their constituents is not simply a fact, which could objectively be assessed by measuring the parliamentarians’ responsiveness of the parliamentarians’ to their voters or by other indicators of the same type. It is theoretically for the citizens to decide how and by whom they want to be represented. Elections are the key mechanism here. They not only allow the voters to select their future representatives; they also allow them to hold the incumbents accountable retrospectively. In return, re-election seeking parliamentarians have an incentive to adopt behaviours that are deemed to please their constituents. The functioning of this electoral accountability mechanism depends on several conditions. The first is the voters’ willingness to take individual characteristics into consideration (rather than party affiliation) when deciding who to support. The second is that the voters know who their representatives are and have an idea of what they are doing. In this article, the link between citizens and parliamentarians is thus tested by looking at whether parliamentary activities have an impact on voters’ knowledge of their representatives and the decision to support them. We make the hypothesis that parliamentarians who are the most active in the assembly should gain visibility and that the voters should reward them in the subsequent election. This hypothesis finds preliminary empirical support in another study (Navarro & Francois 2017), where we tested the impact of parliamentary activities on the candidacy and election scores of incumbent MPs. This time, we will base our analysis on the outcome of a post-electoral survey with the voters of randomly-selected electoral districts. The focus of the article will be on the 2007 French legislative elections.