Comparing constituency activity by junior legislators in Great Britain and Ireland

To compare the relationship between constituency service and reelection concerns for British junior MPs and Irish junior deputies (TDs), we analyze interviews with 45 British MPs and 40 Irish TDs. Using a comparison of frequencies and Poisson regression analysis, we find support for the familiar expectations that TDs are substantially more active in their constituencies than are MPs, that they are more inclined than MPs to cite reelection as a motive for such:activity, and that there is a stronger statistical relationship between reelection motivation and constituency activity for TDs than for MPs. We also find a positive relationship for both countries between distance from the capital and number of days per week spent in the constituency doing constituency work.