Analysing the Importance of Localness for MP Campaigning and Legislative Performance.

Understanding how MPs use ties to their constituency, or localness, is important for understanding the nature of the MP-constituency relationship. MPs are expected to actively focus on their constituency in their work to help their campaign and gain re-election. To explore the relationship between MPs and the use of localness we examine the use of localness in their legislative activity. Combining the focus on constituency and parliamentary behaviour data is not often done and we utilise a dataset allowing us to test the impact of localness on parliamentary behaviour. We support the quantitative findings with qualitative interviews with MPs. We find that, above all, MPs with local ties will seek to signal their localness to the electorate in terms of constituency focus, but not in their parliamentary contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]