Legislators' Constituency Focus Across Electoral Systems

ABSTRACT Previous studies argue that incentives to cultivate a personal reputation and maximize personal votes make legislators more likely to focus on their constituencies in candidate‐centered than party‐centered systems. Empirical analyses, however, have yielded mixed support for this hypothesis. We provide new tests of the relationship between electoral system characteristics and constituency signaling in speeches, holding individual legislators fixed. We examine speeches given by legislators from England, Scotland, and Wales in the European Parliament (EP) and in the UK House of Commons. This allows us to follow the same legislators (1) across an electoral system change in the EP in 1999 and (2) when they move between the EP and the House of Commons. In line with expectations, we find that constituency signaling in speeches is more likely when the same legislators are elected under candidate‐centered rules.