Unequal Responsiveness in MP-Citizen Communication: A Comparative Field Experiment

In the past decade, numerous studies have used field experiments to investigate how responsive legislators are in their communication with citizens, and whether such responsiveness is biased in favor of distinct social groups. These studies form an important complement to more traditional studies of policy representation by illuminating an additional dimension of political (in)equality. However, this new literature is limited in various ways: (a) almost all studies cover single countries, usually the United States; (b) studies tend to analyze single sources of unequal responsiveness, particularly race/ethnicity; (c) most studies send service requests to legislators instead of policy-related queries. In this paper, we report the results of an original, pre-registered field experiment that addresses these limitations. In November and December of 2020, we sent emails from fictitious citizens to all parliamentarians in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, where the ethnic background, social class, gender and partisanship of the sender was randomly varied. These emails inquired about parliamentarians’ priorities regarding the highly salient issue of COVID-19 and its societal impact. Hypotheses tested in the paper are that legislators are generally less responsive to ethnic minority, female and working-class citizens, and that such inequality is most pronounced in large electoral districts. We also explore potential intersectionality that may particularly disadvantage some groups, such as ethnic minority women. Our results have important implications for the topic of political inequality by providing more insight into the nature and reach of unequal responsiveness than previous studies have done.