Voter Preferences for Legislators' Effort Allocation: Evidence From Taiwan
2026-05-22
How legislators divide their efforts between constituency service and parliamentary work has long attracted scholarly attention, yet we know far less about how voters evaluate this trade‐off. This paper addresses this gap by examining how voters evaluate legislators' effort allocation between constituency service and parliamentary work in Taiwan, a context where legislators traditionally devote substantial energy to constituency service, and how pre‐existing representational priorities condition these evaluations. We employ an original conjoint experiment and show that Taiwanese voters generally prefer legislators who balance constituency service and parliamentary work, while penalizing those who focus too heavily on one dimension. Furthermore, we demonstrate that citizens' stated representational priorities shape these evaluations: respondents who prioritize parliamentary work favor legislators who allocate more effort to national policymaking, whereas those who prioritize constituency service reward greater local engagement. Taken together, these findings suggest that a preference for balanced representation may be widespread and that incorporating voters' expectations is essential for understanding the dynamics of political representation.