The Responsiveness of MPs to Citizen-Initiated Policy-Related Inquiries

Weakening partisanship in West European democracies raises pressing questions regarding viable mechanisms that can secure the responsiveness of representative institutions. Advancing from this, we investigate whether individual MPs pay attention to citizen-initiated policy-related inquiries in low information environments, what types of cues most often gain their attention, and how electoral contexts condition the interactions of citizens and MPs. We develop an informational model of responsiveness, which posits that MPs command scare resources and simultaneously face a large number of social demands. As a result, the likelihood and type of their responses to citizen requests is affected by cues that function as informational short-cuts and help them to focus their activities onto most relevant requests. Most relevant cues relate to the sender’s background (social and ethnic status), their partisanship, and the extent to which the sender expresses personal support for the MP. We study these expectations via correspondence field experiments among national MPs in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. In these experiments, e-mails written by fictitious constituents are sent to inquire about the policy position of MPs. We vary sender characteristics to test the effect of cue-giving on response rates and response characteristics. This paper presents the pre-analysis plan for this study. We believe it contributes to the literature on MPs’ individual responsiveness by (a) conducting a similar experiment in three countries, (b) focusing on policy rather than service questions, and (c) including richer measures of the dependent variable.