Is All Politics Local? When Do MPs Speaks About Constituency Interest

This paper seeks to explore the determinants that makes an MP focus on local interest of their constituency in the House of Commons. An extensive body of literature has discussed this issue in the US congress, but research in UK remain limited as high party discipline and government control of the legislative agenda made it difficult to discover MPs focus on various issues. This paper seeks to shed light on the subject by looking at the content of speeches made by MPs using topic model to determine their attentiveness on various policy area. The result would demonstrate that there are indeed congruence between MPs focus on certain policy area and constituency characteristic and MPs tendency to focus on issues related to their constituency interest is dependent on their electoral security, their former occupations as well as their parliamentary career.