Within legislative studies most of the empirical research on political representation in advanced industrial democracies and on how it is performed through parliaments’ work and MPs connecting with the citizenry focuses on comparing constituents’ ideological or issue preferences (surveys) to the behaviors of their representatives (roll calls, advocacy questions to the cabinet…). At the same time, opinion research is constantly providing us with survey results about the high (and most often growing) levels of distrust from citizens towards institutions and elected officials. We should therefore manage to understand the overarching attitudes of citizens towards parliaments and MPs in terms of legitimacy and procedural expectations rather than looking first at their possible converging or opposing views with MPs on particular issues or policy preferences (Hibbing & Theiss-Morse). Legislative studies could thus address, specify and substantiate some questions raised by the “quality of democracy” theoretical perspective which sometimes lacks precisely defined empirical settings. In order to do so, this paper presents and discusses the research design and some findings of an interpretive study based on focus groups interviews held in six French National Assembly constituencies in 2010-2011 as a part of the broader LEGIPAR project. Though groups’ members knowledge about Parliament is rather low, their talking about MPs behaviors and more or less achieved compliance to their expected role and function provides us with a thorough set of data on citizens’ reasoning. Our analysis of this original material focuses on the most complex and undecided topics and issues raised by the groups in order to assess to which extent and under which conditions citizens may be supportive of parliament and MPs. Results show that connectedness is strongly required while legislative work is conceived as a consequence of it rather than an alternative part of representation. They are compared to MPs rationales about how they divide their weekly effort between Assembly’s work and constituency activities (LEGIPAR survey). Consequences for a supportive attitude of citizens towards parliament and MPs are discussed as well as further research using mixed methods research design.
