Legislator or Representative? Politicians’ Tasks According to Voters

Politicians perform multiple tasks from scrutinizing legislative proposal and questioning ministers’ actions to meeting citizens in their district offices, on the streets, or on social media. The tasks are demanding and unavoidably require politicians to prioritise their time and resources. Their task priorities are crucial for the quality of political representation. Most often politicians’ activities have been studied based on the assumption that politicians are vote seekers. However, very few have engaged with the question of how voters actually prefer politicians’ to prioritise their tasks. This paper proposes a conceptual framework classifying politicians’ task into two main categories: functional tasks related to performing parliamentary functions on behalf of voters and relational tasks focused on building or maintaining representative relations with constituents. Based on this conceptualization, it presents competing hypotheses regarding voters’ relative task preferences and tests these hypotheses using survey data from representative samples of UK, US, German, and Danish voters (n=8,000). The study includes four analytical steps: exploring open ended answers, rating and ranking pre-defined tasks, and finally a forced choice, conjoint experiment relating the importance of tasks to descriptive characteristics of the politician. The study contributes to our understanding of voters’ representative preferences focusing on practical day-to-day priorities salient to every politician’s performance and crucial for democratic representation.