In the section above, we reported on the actual interaction between citizens and politicians in the four selected municipalities. For our research project, we were also interested in the normative expectations that people have about interaction with local politicians. What is it that people in Riemst, Visé, Übach-Palenberg and Valkenburg expect from the representatives that were elected to the municipal council?
First of all, it is very clear that citizens in all four municipalities expect the local politicians to get in touch with them. A large part of the citizens - in Visé and Übach-Palenberg, more than 90% - want politicians to contact them. In Valkenburg, this percentage is the lowest (62%). The 38% percent of the people who don’t want politicians to contact them mostly
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give reasons that can be formulated as: ‘Why would I want that, it wouldn’t change anything’.
The reasons people want politicians to get in touch with them is mostly for giving input. In all four municipalities, this is the reason that is mentioned most. Other reasons are explaining council decisions (output), and election-related communication. Explaining output comes second. People have different reasons for not mentioning this often: on the one hand, they feel that explaining decisions after they are taken comes too late (‘nothing can be done about it anymore, right?’) and, on the other hand, they sometimes point out to us that the municipality (i.e. not the politicians) already informs the citizens about new policies and rules. Election-related communication is mentioned the least. People sometimes made it very clear to us that they don’t want this kind of interaction.
Citizens also mentioned other reasons for expecting politicians to contact them. Interestingly, we found that some citizens would like their politicians to get in touch with them simply to get to know each other a bit more. Especially in Riemst, people mentioned this remarkable reason several times. It is the ultimate example of the trustee perception of a representative: a politician that is in close contact with his grass roots and who knows what his voters want and do.
Citizens also consider taking the initiative to get in touch with local politicians. We asked them whether they would do this, and for what reason. The results show that, in all four municipalities, citizens have different reasons for possibly contacting a politician, but there is no real pattern: individual problems, general problems, before a council decision will be taken, and after a decision is already taken, all these situations are mentioned by people when asked why they would approach a local politician. Based on the earlier research (Peters et al 2015), we might have expected Belgian citizens (in Riemst and Visé) to mention individual problems most, but that is not what we found.
Finally, we present some figures on the different types of local politicians that citizens would contact. The mayor is definitely on top of the list for citizens in the municipalities where we did our research. In Übach- Palenberg, about ¾ of the people mention the mayor when we ask which politician they would go to if they needed one. In Riemst, a bit more than half of the people refer to the mayor when asked which politician they would go to, often adding comments like ‘the mayor, of course’.
As the mayor is either directly elected as mayor (Germany) or the leader of the largest party in the elections (Belgium), we were not very surprised by these findings: the mayor is the most visible politician in the local political
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system in both countries. It is surprising though that in Visé more people would go see a councillor, rather than the mayor. It seems that the distance between the mayor of Visé and the citizens we talked to is somewhat larger than in Riemst and Übach-Palenberg, as people explained their preference by saying that it is generally difficult to get in touch with the mayor and that it is unlikely he will give a direct answer to their questions.
In Valkenburg, the aldermen were the most popular choice for people when planning to contact a local politician. The reason people gave was that the aldermen are the ones in the position to actually do something for them, and they often mentioned that they would choose the one with the relevant portfolio.
The position that the politician occupies is by far the most important reason for people to approach a certain politician, whether it is the mayor, the alderman or a councillor. Having a personal relationship with a specific politician (friendship or family) is also often mentioned as a reason. The political party the politician is representing or the fact that he/she belongs to either the coalition or the opposition is seldom mentioned. That fits with the image that local politics are not very ‘politicized’, at least not in the Netherlands (Denters c.s. 2011). To our surprise, contacting a politician from your own neighborhood or village is not a common thing amongst our respondents. This finding seems to somewhat contradict last year’s report, which stated that, in Valkenburg and Riemst, the villages (dorpen or kernen) play a significant role in the political life of the municipality (Peters et al, 2015, p. 47).