Constituency Service (Staff’s Version): How MP’s Staff do Representation

Political staffers are important actors in representation. Drawing from original surveys of Members of Parliament (MPs) (N=98) and their staff (N=365) in Canada, I examine how staff contribute to representation, and how these processes are gendered and racialized. While most MPs agree that helping constituents is an important part of their job, they also acknowledge that staff often fulfil this service representation work, and that it is quicker for staff to help constituents rather than their MPs. Staff choose which interactions are important for the MP to know about. MPs trust their staff’s discretion in assessing when they should be informed. By investigating constituent interactions, I argue that staff streamline, absorb, and sanitize interactions for politicians. I argue that staff, not MPs, are often doing the everyday substantive actions of representation. While research is beginning to investigate who works for politicians and why (McKee 2023), the contribution of staff’s labour in research is often absent from research (Bauer and Cargile 2023), or the unit of analysis becomes the legislator’s office rather than individual staffers (Thomsen and Sanders 2020). Limiting research to elected representatives and/or offices misses important insights about the mélange of representation, particularly with respect to staff (Celis and Childs 2020). This study explores how staff’s labour contributes to representation, including how politicians use their staff to fulfil their representational duties.