Providing husbands for daughters, getting people out of prison, curing alcoholism, or even preventing a person from being gay. These are examples of requests, not to a deity, but to parliamentarians.
Such requests can be as long as they are eclectic. And in these days of social media, accelerating from email through to Facebook and Twitter, constituents expect a response almost immediately, says social researcher Professor Colleen Lewis.
As head of Social Science at Monash University’s Johannesburg campus in South Africa, Professor Lewis is part of an international team investigating the education and training of federal Members of Parliament (MPs) in 10 countries: Australia, Canada, Chile, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Romania, South Africa, the UK, Uruguay and Vietnam. The research is funded through the Australian Research Council, in conjunction with the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) and the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Findings are expected to be relevant to various systems of government around the world.
During the past two years more than 100 interviews and surveys have been undertaken with MPs in the 10 participating countries. Professor Lewis says the findings leave her genuinely concerned that the role of a parliamentarian, in its current form, is overwhelming for many MPs, particularly backbenchers who have only limited support staff.
The unrealistic expectations of constituents and growing time pressures are chief among her concerns, especially as there is no real job description for parliamentarians, or clearly articulated performance indicators.
“Re-election is not really a performance indicator because there are so many things that can alter voting behaviour that a parliamentarian can do little about. There is no formal agreement between a parliamentarian and his or her employer – the voters – about what is expected. There is also no general agreement about what the role of an MP is among parliamentarians themselves,” Professor Lewis says.
The Samara Reports – Canadian research based on exit interviews with parliamentarians – identified diverse views, and ongoing uncertainty about their role. For example, some believed it was their job to represent their constituents, others to follow the line set by their political party or the interests of a specific ethnic group to which they belong. Some MPs saw their role as helping to frame policy and laws in the interests of the nation as a whole while others “follow their conscience”.
Along with the lack of a job description, many Canadian MPs in the Samara research and Australian parliamentarians in the ARC study reported they did not really understand the requirements of the job before being elected – particularly those elected unexpectedly after volunteering to be a ‘name on the ballot’ for their political party. Perhaps what is needed, she suggests, is some independent ‘pre-parliamentary’ counselling or education so that candidates for election might better understand what they are potentially letting themselves in for. It is a subject she hopes to investigate further.
What the role does involve ranges from the minutiae of running a local electoral office, which is effectively a small business in its own right, to the making of governments and even, although rare, the dissolution of a government, to force an election.
The demands on a parliamentarian’s time are enormous says Professor Lewis, and have been exacerbated by three factors: the growth of local electoral or constituency work, the rise of technology and what she sees as an increasingly vexatious relationship between politicians and the media.
Parliamentarians from many countries have reported an increase in requests for representation from local constituents. Figures documented by the Hansard Society in the UK are reflected in many other nations, Professor Lewis says. The Hansard Society reports the average working week for a British MP increased from 62 hours in 1982 to 71 hours by 2005. There is every reason to believe that it has increased yet again in the past seven years.
Technology was identified as imposing new demands on a parliamentarian’s time, particularly email, making MPs accessible to constituents 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In September 2010 one newly elected UK MP tallied 22,000 emails in her first six months in the role – more than 3600 emails a month to deal with in addition to the many other demands of her position.
Professor Lewis is also critical of the media’s pursuit of politicians in the name of entertainment, a point reinforced in the hearings of the Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the press in the UK. She says there has been a clear change of emphasis in many media circles from providing information and acting as a check on public activities, to that of entertaining and titillating audiences. “If that involves crawling all over the private life of a politician then as far as many in the media are concerned, it’s fair game,” Professor Lewis says.
In Australia, former federal parliamentarian and cabinet minster Lindsay Tanner has branded the current relationship between the media and politicians as a “carnival sideshow”, saying that the more inane the media’s coverage of politics becomes the more inane politicians’ responses must become in order to get coverage – which they need in seeking re-election.
The result, says Professor Lewis, is that MPs are forced to respond to these media stories for days and weeks at a time, rather than attending to their constituents, or getting on with the business of government. It also leaves a dwindling amount of time for parliamentarians to learn about the many complex issues on which they are expected to vote, such as the likely impacts of the finer details in carbon tax or climate change legislation.
“Given the growing demands of constituents, access 24/7 through new technologies and ceaseless scrutiny of a parliamentarian’s activities, including his or her (not-so) private life, I think it’s becoming impossible for one person to satisfy the requirements of the job,” Professor Lewis says.
