Types of issues, salience and Legislators' Responsiveness: An Elite Experiment in Two Countries

A basic premise of democratic governance is that political actors represent citizens’ wishes, but responsiveness is not constant and not a given. Representatives’ responsiveness varies by the type of citizen demand and by the electoral considerations. Building on theories on salience and issue competition, we expect that representatives are more likely to respond to important than to marginal policy issues. Using an experimental design, we recruit citizen who address different types of policy demands to their representative. In the first version, representatives are asked to highly salient policy problems, namely concerns about the economy or immigration. In the second version, representatives are asked to respond to marginal policy concerns, namely voting age or online gambling. We use blocked randomization based on representatives’ personal characteristics to assign one version of the letter to elected representatives and assess their responsiveness based on whether or not we receive an answer to the stated policy problem. Contrary to our expectations, we find that representatives are more likely to respond to marginal issues than to important ones. These findings prompt us to explore three alternative mechanisms issue complexity and divisiveness as well as professionalization.