The manner in which legislators gain office has implications for democratic theory. Modern political science equates representation with policy responsiveness. But if service responsiveness looms largely in the contemporary representative-constituent relationship, perhaps much of what legislators do and constituents want is not representation. Coherent national policy can be difficult to achieve when individual legislators have little incentive to subordinate service responsiveness to a larger end. The problem, from the standpoint of assigning political responsibility, is the reduced ability to produce coherent policy decisions. By accident or intent, representational trade-offs exist. If responsiveness to the individual needs of the ordinary citizen waxes, party responsiveness, as well as the representation of the collectivity wanes. Studies concerning the ways in which legislators sustain or increase their constituent support have often contradicted one another and have resulted in differing conclusions. The major limitation of this literature is that most, if not all, of the data on perquisites are highly aggregated, and district level data are often unavailable.. In this investigation the researcher addresses these problems, and takes advantage of access to data on actual constituent-member contacts to observe and record two groups of respondents, one that had candidate contact and one that has not. Data are from 1,100 telephone interviews in a selected legislative district. The study probes the impact of legislative perquisites on constituent evaluations (i.e., incumbent reputation and constituent trust) as well as voting decisions. It focuses on a particular perquisite, ombudsmen service as the provision of assistance to individuals to resolve a problem with a federal agency. Using simulatneous equation modeling, hypotheses tested will reveal how legislators' use of perquisites to encourage and perform casework affect constituent evaluations and voting decisions. Results will illuminate how constituents respond to incumbent behavior. The resulting effects on contemporary representative-constituent relationships and the "repsonsible parties" model of government will also be addressed.
