What Should MPs Do? Public and Parliamentarians ’ Views Compared

The notion that voters are demanding ever more constituency activity from their MPs is now a widely-accepted tenet of British politics. There is a great deal of survey work demonstrating that voters place a high priority on constituency con-nections of all kinds, but we know less about how voters ’ priorities compare with MPs ’ ranking of constituency work against competing aspects of their role. In this article we compare matched surveys of voters and MPs and establish that there is less difference between the priorities they give to constituency versus other activity than we might expect. 1