The Professor Will See You Now: Post
Illustration by Tracy Worrall
4 min read
Lessons in political science. This week: post
The letter the constituent received ended, as they often do, with some polite boilerplate. “Please feel free to contact me with other matters that are of importance to you. I am honored to serve as your representative in the US Congress”.
But then it continued, in a way these letters usually don’t: “I think you’re an asshole.”
Congresswoman Jo Ann Emerson was forced to apologise, saying that she didn’t know how that happened or who was responsible; if she ever found out, she never made it public. But it is a rare MP or staffer who has not wanted to add a similar parting shot occasionally.
It used to be letters: almost five million pieces of post arrived at Westminster in 2005; that had fallen to just over 1.2 million by 2019 and is now below the million mark every year. But email has grown to replace it, which I suspect does little to reduce the asshole coefficient.
Given how resource intensive it is, we know surprisingly little about MP-constituent post. There have been few efforts to follow in the footsteps of Frances Morrell’s 1977 study of postbags or Richard Rawlings’ detailed analysis of MPs’ casework from 1990 – although a fascinating article just published in the Historical Journal has examined some of the existing archival collections of MPs post.
One innovation is what are known as correspondence or audit studies, a very common way to check for bias. You send off a bunch of otherwise identical CVs or letters to companies and you see if those from John get more positive replies than those from Joan, or indeed those from Mohammed. When some academics tried something similar with MPs a few years ago, there was a big row; the Speaker got involved, claiming it might be a contempt of the House.
I had assumed that warning would be the end of such studies of Westminster. No one wants to end up in chokey, just to get an article in The British Journal of Political Science.
Hence my surprise to see a new study is forthcoming. Turns out this new one was carried out before the last row, with the fieldwork undertaken in 2018-19. Its publication in 2026 is a bit of an indictment on academic lead times but should at least stop them having their collars felt.
Even more of a defence is that this time no fakery was involved at all. In a clever methodological innovation, this study recruited students to send letters to MPs. These were real constituents, participating voluntarily, and the study ensured that the messages sent reflected their genuine views. The only difference is that the research study was able to track them.
Given how resource intensive it is, we know surprisingly little about MP-constituent post
The letters were on policy, covering a range of different issues: Brexit, student finance, immigration. The main findings are all null (of one result, the authors say the “estimated coefficient on the constituent-party congruence treatment is non-significant, wrongly signed, and close to zero”, which is a null result in its purest form). There was no difference between the rates of reply, or their content, depending on “constituent congruence”, that is whether the writer agreed with the MP or not. Lest you think this is obvious, US studies find the opposite.
There was similarly no difference between loyalists and rebels on particular issues. Marginality didn’t seem to matter either. This is all, in many ways, actually very positive: constituents are getting equal treatment, whatever their views.
The secondary finding is, to me, more interesting. Holding responses came from 63 per cent of MPs, but a substantive response came from just 46 per cent of those contacted. This was lower than I was expecting. Perhaps the policy-related nature of the questions lowered the extent to which MPs felt a response was required (would casework get a higher response?); perhaps the relatively short nature of the emails made some MPs treat them as campaign group generated? Having just been writing to MPs myself for something else, I’m at least confident the holding replies these days would be close to 100 per cent.
At least no one replied: I think you’re an asshole.
Further reading: K Kowol and R Toye, The Management of British MPs’ Postbags and Politician-Voter Relations in the Democratic Age, The Historical Journal (2026); D Bischof et al, When Legislators Do Not Differentiate: A Field Experiment on British MPs’ Responses to Constituency Policy Queries, British Journal of Political Science (2026)
