With no functioning Assembly at Stormont, there have been calls for a reduction or complete cut of salaries for Members of the Legislative Assembly. However, constituency work is continuing in Northern Ireland: Sean Haughey has examined how much constituency service MLAs actually provide, and what it entails.
It is an important week for Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) in Northern Ireland. On Friday a review commissioned by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland is due to recommend a pay cut for the region’s legislators to account for there being no functioning Assembly. Despite calls for their pay to be stopped entirely, there is an expectation that the adjusted rate of salary will reflect the work that MLAs continue to undertake in their constituencies. But how much constituency service do MLAs actually provide? And what exactly does it entail? This post reports on some of the main findings of a recent study of constituency service in Northern Ireland.
MLAs attach considerable importance to constituency service, devoting an average of 27.9 working hours per week to its provision. This figure is remarkably commensurate with the constituency service provision of Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) and National Assembly for Wales (AMs), at 27.4 and 28.1 hours respectively (Bradbury & Mitchell, 2007). However, given the number of MLAs per constituency (five, formerly six) and the region’s relatively small population, constituents in Northern Ireland undoubtedly receive the most attention from their representatives in the devolved UK context. The latest census figures indicate an MLA-to-citizen ratio of approximately 1:17,000 in Northern Ireland, compared with 1:51,000 in Wales and 1:41,000 in Scotland.
As Table 1 reveals, there is noticeable variation between the main political parties in terms of their constituency service effort. Although this type of inter-party variation is not unusual (Cain et al., 1987; Russo, 2012), lack of data until now has made it difficult to establish the general dispositions of Northern Ireland’s main political parties towards constituency service. This study reveals Democratic Unionist (DUP) MLAs to be the most constituency-orientated, with the party’s MLAs devoting over 32 hours per week to constituency service. Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) MLAs closely follow as the second-most constituency-orientated, devoting just under 30 hours per week to constituency service. A more noticeable gap in constituency service effort then emerges between unionist and non-unionist parties. Nationalist Sinn Féin and Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) MLAs rank joint third, both providing 25.6 hours of constituency service per week. Of the five main parties in the NIA, Alliance Party MLAs, who designate as ‘other’ (neither nationalist nor unionist), are the least constituency-orientated, allocating 23.4 hours per week to constituency service.
So what does this ‘constituency service’ involve? How exactly do MLAs ‘connect’ with their constituents and what does this tell us about their ‘home style’ (Fenno, 1978)? André and Depauw (2013) offer a framework that categorises legislators’ constituency styles based on the nature of the legislator’s communication strategies: one-to-one, one-to-few, and one-to-many. As can be seen in the table below, MLAs clearly have a preference for one-to-one interactions, with constituent home visits and constituency surgeries the most frequently provided services. One-to-one activities create a closer and more solid relationship with constituents, but are costly in time and resources (Brack & Pilet, 2016). Visiting constituents at home is particularly time-consuming, yet more than two-thirds of MLAs participate in the activity at least once a fortnight.
Local event attendance, a one-to-few activity, is also popular among MLAs, with almost one third of the sample attending a wedding, party, funeral, or similar event at least once a week. Although meeting local businesses is also a one-to-few activity, it is noticeably less popular among MLAs, narrowing the MLAs’ preferred style to mostly social one-to-one and one-to-few activities. Despite being perhaps the most cost-effective, newsletter publication, a one-to-many activity, is rare among MLAs, with most producing one every three months or not at all. This contrasts sharply with newsletter usage in devolved Scotland and Wales, where around 44 per cent of MSPs and 30 per cent of AMs produce one at least fortnightly.
Arguably, this style is more in sync with legislators in the Republic of Ireland than with those in the rest of the UK. The importance MLAs attach to local events is a case in point: whereas 57 per cent of MLAs attend an event at least once a fortnight, the collective figure for MPs, MSPs, and AMs for the same is less than 7 per cent (André et al., 2014). More than 70 per cent of members of the Irish Dáil, on the other hand, attend a local event on a fortnightly basis (ibid).
The preference for such a personalised and time-consuming home style would support a parochial characterisation of MLAs. At the very least, the study reveals that MLAs spend more time on constituency work than on parliamentary duties: when the Assembly was up and running, the weekly averaged time declared by MLAs for time spent on ‘plenary, committee, and all party group preparation and attendance’ was 22.9 hours. MLAs have a case, then, for having a substantial chunk of their salaries protected from a pay cut given the dominance of constituency service in their working week. There is also a case, however, for a serious reconsideration of the MLA’s role when (or if) the Assembly resumes. Is the prioritisation of constituency service to the detriment of MLAs’ legislative role? One veteran MLA is convinced it is:
They open every flower show that there is, go to every church that there is, every school show, and they will be the bee’s knees and everybody will love them! But they might not make much of a contribution in terms of their legislative role. You have got to ask, is that what you want from an MLA?
Notes
Sean Haughey is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics at the University of Liverpool. His research focuses on legislative behaviour in the Northern Ireland Assembly and is funded by the ESRC. Sean’s article ‘Extra-parliamentary behaviour in Northern Ireland: MLAs and constituency service’ was published by the Journal of Legislative Studies in November. He tweets at @S_Haughey.