How political and social constituent traits affect the responsiveness of legislators: A Comparative Field Experiment

A growing body of literature investigates whether legislators show biases in their constituency communication contingent upon constituent traits. However, we know little about whether and how findings of unequal responsiveness generalize across countries (beyond the United States) and across different traits. We address both issues using a pre-registered comparative field experiment conducted in Germany, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, in which fictitious citizens (varied by ethnicity, social class and partisan affiliation) inquired about legislators’ policy priorities regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. Our pooled analysis reveals that co-partisanship and class both increase the responsiveness of legislators while we find no effect for ethnicity. The effect sizes we find are small, but comparable to earlier studies and also noteworthy in view of our hard test design. Our exploratory analyses further corroborate the lack of discrimination against ethnic minority constituents in showing no intersectionality effects, that is, interactions between ethnic-minority and low-class identities. This exploratory step also addresses the country specific differences that we find. We speculate about plausible underlying party system effects that we, however, cannot substantiate due to statistical limitations. This important issue requires further attention in future research.