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Published October 9, 2017 | Submitted
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Casework Service in Great Britain and the United States

Abstract

The policy-making component of representation in the U.S. and Great Britain has been closely studied and compared, but the constituency's component—the handling of constituent complaints and the protection of constituency interests—is less well understood. This paper considers two questions about the constituency component of representation: how much and what kinds of casework services do MPs as opposed to Congressmen provide, and secondly, what are the statistical determinants of these activities? With regard to the first question, our findings indicate that MPs devote more of their own time and resources to constituency work than do Congressmen. In addition, we identify representatives on both sides of the Atlantic who adopt a more aggressive strategy towards their constituency work. This strategy is manifested by such activities as publicizing successful cases, handling cases which concern local government matters, the frequency of surgeries and the active solicitation of cases. In the second part of this paper, we model these activities as being related to the electoral margin, party and the year the representative was elected. These estimations indicate that casework entrepreneurs in both countries are most likely to be in marginal seats, recently elected and Democrats or Labour.

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Created:
August 19, 2023
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January 14, 2024