How legislators respond to citizens in times of crisis. A Field Experiment with Members of the 19. German Bundestag during the Covid-19 pandemic

Do crisis facilitate unbiased responsiveness among legislators given the high levels of saliency and the pervasive “rallying around the flag” sentiments that result from these conditions? Or do they rather sustain patterns of deferential responsiveness given the information overload that legislators face and the dominance of the mode of responsible (executive) government. In this paper, we explore the mediating effect of electoral rules in this regard, whether nominally elected legislators tend to respond in unbiased ways while legislators elected via party lists tend to respond in biased ways. To explore this argument, we conducted a field experiment with all members of the German Bundestag during a crucial phase in the Covid-19 crisis in November and December 2020. In this experiment, fictitious constituents voiced concern about the economic and societal impact of the pandemic and asked legislators what they and their parties are planning to do to get German citizens through this crisis. In this experiment, legislators were contacted by different types of constituents such as partisans vs. non-partisans. This allows to explore systematic biases in direct mass-elite interactions, i.e. deferential responsiveness. The German mixed-member system allows to not only test for the direct effects that result from our treatments but also explore how they interact with legislators’ mode of election and thus whether different legislators respond to concerned citizens in different ways.