Legislators make trade-offs when allocating their time and resources to their multiple tasks of representation, legislation, executive oversight, and constituency service. Furthermore, they must decide how much effort to exert or the balance to strike when undertaking a specific function. Existing research provides limited insights into citizens’ preferences over these officeholder multifaceted decisions in sub-Saharan Africa. I offer novel insights into citizens’ preferences using a conjoint survey experiment of Ghanaians to address this knowledge gap. My findings are threefold. First, I find that citizens put more ‘weight’ on constituency-related activities than parliamentary work. Second, in the constituency, citizens value political representation activities more than constituency services. Third, they weigh public-good-oriented constituency services higher than private ones. The research contributes to our understanding of citizen–legislator accountability relationships in sub-Saharan Africa.

中文翻译：

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选民希望从立法者那里得到什么？来自加纳的证据


立法者在将时间和资源分配给代表、立法、行政监督和选区服务等多项任务时会做出权衡。此外，他们必须决定在承担特定职能时要付出多少努力或达到何种平衡。现有研究对撒哈拉以南非洲地区公民对这些公职人员多方面决策的偏好提供的了解有限。我通过对加纳人的联合调查实验提供了有关公民偏好的新颖见解，以解决这一知识差距。我的发现有三个方面。首先，我发现公民对与选区相关的活动比对议会工作更加“重视”。其次，在选区，公民对政治代表活动的重视程度高于选区服务。第三，他们更重视以公共利益为导向的选民服务，而不是私人服务。这项研究有助于我们了解撒哈拉以南非洲地区公民与立法者问责关系。