Abstract
The selection process by which individuals are recruited and elected into office creates a population of elected officials with distinct characteristics and personality traits. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between those personality traits and the representational approaches and behaviors of local elected officials. Combining a survey of local municipal officials with an audit study with the same individuals, we examine how variations in the personality traits of local officials affect their preferred representational approaches and responsiveness to constituent policy concerns. We find significant variation by personality traits both in the approaches that local officials take to representation as well as the rate and nature of the responsiveness of these officials to inquiries about policy from constituents with whom they agree and disagree.
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Although not their primary focus, some scholars have examined behaviors that are related to representation in studies focusing primarily on personality and legislative behaviors. Ramey et al. (2017) use text-based personality measures to show relationships between personality and constituency service related behaviors. Dietrich et al. (2012) use survey measures of personality and examine state legislators interest in “meeting with constituents.”.
Andeweg and Thomassen (2005) use a more nuanced typology of representation but find that politicians favor a top-down style of representation consistent with the trustee model. Most of the work cited by Dassonneville et al. (2020) involves national-level politicians. We are unaware of other work on municipal officials that asks about representational style. The closest are surveys of US state legislators by Carey et al., (1998, 2006), which suggest that state legislators are near the middle or slightly adhere to trustee-style representation. (Since raw distributions of legislators’ responses are not reported, we estimate this using the coefficients reported in the regression results.).
Though we realize that elected officials inevitably face conflict as part of their jobs, they may likely view going along with majority opinion as lowering the chance of strong challengers thus reducing electoral conflict.
IRBs at both BYU and Cornell College approved the project.
Response rates to some questions, including personality questions, were lower. The exact response rate may be higher than 11% given difficulties in calculating exact response rates due to limitations of the email lists. The 11% response rate is conservative (the upper range is around 21%) but in line with surveys of local officials (e.g. Butler and Dynes (2016)).
The 17.8% is calculated as follows: 2,165/(.4375*27,862).
We note, however, our use of a shorter battery limits our ability to identify which facets of each personality trait drive our results. In discussing our results, we mention facets that may help explain the results, but we cannot test these directly.
Other research has used similar questions to measure this construct (e.g., Carey et al., 1998, 2006; McCrone and Kuklinski 1979). Andeweg and Thomassen (2005) use a more nuanced typology to measure politicians’ representational views and find that officials favor a style of representation consistent with the trustee model.
A distribution of the responses by respondents’ partisanship is available in Figure A9 in the online appendix.
We realize local office differs significantly from state and federal office (Oliver et al., 2012), especially in the types of people holding these positions.
Term limits and tenure diminish reelection concerns, especially given incumbency advantage (de Benedictis-Kessner 2018).
Agreeableness has a coefficient of 0.052 meaning a move from the extreme ends (2 std. dev. below to 2 std. dev. above the mean) predicts a 0.208 change in the dependent variable. Meanwhile, the close election variable is an indicator variable and has a coefficient of 0.177.
As expected from previous research, municipal officials with a longer tenure are more likely to see themselves as trustees. However, conservative local officials or who represent cities with term limits are more likely to see themselves as delegates. These findings may differ from past work due to differences in the nature of municipal office (Oliver et al., 2012) compared to state legislatures (Carey et al., 2006) or Congress and public opinion on partisan issues and national offices (Barker & Carman, 2012). However, patterns among MCs vary over time and the nature of congressional representation is fundamentally different than representation at the local level (Oliver et al., 2012).
In other work, we looked at the effect of gender on the responsiveness of male and female elected officials. We found no effect of constituent gender, nor were officials more responsive to constituents who share their gender.
Initial checks of the email responses suggested less than 5% were from supporting staff and most of those responses were the result of requests from the public official (i.e. the public official had forwarded the individual email to the office staff with a request the staffer address the constituent’s request).
While this issue is likely representative of contentious issues generally, it is possible uncontroversial issues might prompt more uniform responses across personality types.
The other two emails contained requests for information regarding how to register to vote and recycle in the community and were used for other projects (Dynes et al., 2022).
We use a question on the original survey about respondents’ position on further development in their community to identify agreement between the email and official’s position on development. Due to survey error, this question was only asked of a portion of individuals. Fortunately, an experimental component of the survey that all respondents answered provided a level of public support for a development project and then asked the local official if they would support the project. (This survey experiment was for another project. See Dynes et al. 2022.) Using the individuals who answered both the survey question about development and the experimental component, we derive support or opposition to development for individuals who were not asked the survey question about their position on development. Full details are available in the online appendix.
Following other suggestions from Coppock (2019) (coding the inclusion of compensating language as 1, a non-response as 0, and the lack of compensating language as -1 (or as 0) and using a multinomial logit (or traditional logit)) produces similar results. We analyze “always responders” because it allows for easier interpretation and does not assume the lack of compensating language is the same as not responding.
This difference in the effect may be from lower levels of professionalization and ambition among local officials. Another possible explanation is the nature of the request is different. In the research by Grose et al. (2015), the constituent wrote about an actual vote the Senator took which makes explanation more important. In our situation, the constituent is writing about a generic policy position which is unrelated to any specific legislative action taken by the elected official.
We also find conscientious elected officials are also consistently less likely to use compensating language, although we do not have good prior expectations for why this might be.
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We are indebted to Dan Butler for his collaboration on the survey of local public officials, to Jessica Preece for her suggestions and feedback, to Austin Dupre and a team of undergraduates at BYU-Idaho for coding the email responses, to the participants of a panel at MPSA in 2019, and to the many anonymous reviewers whose suggestions improved the manuscript. Replication material for this article is available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/TBBSFI.
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Dynes, A.M., Hassell, H.J.G. & Miles, M.R. Personality Traits and Approaches to Political Representation and Responsiveness: An Experiment in Local Government. Polit Behav 45, 1791–1811 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-022-09800-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-022-09800-7