Offers of assistance in politician–constituent interaction

Abstract

How do politicians engage with and offer to assist their constituents; the people who vote them into power? We address the question by analyzing a corpus of 80 interactions recorded at the office of a Member of Parliament (MP) in the United Kingdom, and comprising telephone calls between constituents and the MP's clerical 'caseworkers' as well as face to face encounters with MPs in their fortnightly 'surgeries'. The data were transcribed, then analysed using conversation analysis, focusing on the design and placement of offers of assistance. We identified three types of offers within a longer 'offering' sequence: 1) 'proposal offers', which typically appear first in any offering sequence, in which politicians and caseworkers make proposals to help their constituents using formats that request permission to do so, or check that the constituent does indeed want help (e.g., "do you want me to"; "we could…"); 2) 'announcement offers', which appear second, and indicate that something has been decided and confirm the intention to act (e.g., "I will do X"), and 3) 'request offers', which appear third, and take for form "let me do X". Request offers indicate that the offer is available but cannot be completed until the current conversation is closed; they also appear in environments in which the constituent reissues their problems and appears dissatisfied with the offers so far. The paper contributes to what we know about making offers in institutional settings, as well as shedding the first empirical light on the workings of the constituency office: the site of engagement between everyday members of the public and their elected representatives.

Getting service at the constituency office: Analyzing citizens’ encounters with their Member of Parliament

“…Future work with this material can systematically identify if and how constituents leave space, and whether and how staff use such a resource. This will also expand previous work showing how the staff design their offers in a way that is sensitive to what is offer-able (Hofstetter and Stokoe 2015). As with extended request sequences in service environments, "[w]hat the request ends up to be is thus a joint construction between the parties" (Lee 2009(Lee : 1255.…”

“…Constituency service is a way for the MP to connect with local residents, to appear (and be) accessible and friendly, and to (hopefully) earn gratitude from citizens that may be repaid at election time (Butler and Collins 2001). Despite the centrality of service provision to the MP's work week, constituency office interactions have only just begun to be examined (Hofstetter 2016;Hofstetter and Stokoe 2015 are the only interactional studies). Despite being the only place where constituents can seek services from the MP face to face, the constituency office has rarely been examined as a site of interaction, let alone for how the participants go about seeking and providing services.…”

One moment, please: Can the speed and quality of political contact affect democratic health?

“…In seeking to understand representation, Hofstetter and Stokoe (2015) argue that not enough attention has been given to the form and processes of interaction between constituents and representatives. Whilst a small literature does attempt to do this, attention has focused on identifying different representative dynamics.…”

Meeting, talk and text: policy and politics in practice

“…Meetings are common to accounts of very different political domains: Wodak's 'day in the life of an MEP' (2009) consists in a series of meetings; Healey's 'planner's day' (1992) is shaped by his scheduled meeting and an unplanned encounter; Bevir and Rhodes's 'everyday life in a ministry' (2006) goes on in and around a series of continually rescheduled meetings, while meetings are likewise intrinsic to 'being a diplomat' (Neumann 2005). The meeting is a basic element of the work of the elected representative, in the constituency (Fenno 1977, Hofstetter andStokoe 2015) and the committee (Lutzker 1969) as well as the debating chamber, in local (Wiseman 1967, Spencer 1971 as well as national government and international organizations (Alger 1966, Riles 2001). The same holds for civil servants and public officials (Kriesberg and Guetzkow 1950), whether they are working in support of committees (Winzen 2011) or liaising with counterparts (Barnett 1997, Geuijen, t'Hart andYesilkagit 2007), engaging with experts (Maybin 2014(Maybin , 2016 or with publics (Escobar 2015).…”