3įirst, we discuss how the pandemic has shuffled MPs’ representational priorities, shifting MPs away from some connection-building activities and toward behaviours that support service connections. 2 The broad themes we present were highly consistent across interviews, although findings may not be generalizable due the relatively small sample. Questions were designed to probe MPs’ self-observed differences in their activities due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with an emphasis on connections with their constituents and how they typically spend their workdays at home and in Ottawa. We conducted semistructured interviews with 11 MPs during May 2020. We view the COVID-19 pandemic as a new influence that could shape the representational behaviours of MPs. 1 MPs have significant autonomy and agency to develop their own representational styles, and they do so in response to several influences. The RCF shows how MPs tailor representational styles through their relative emphasis on four types of such connections: policy, service, symbolic and party connections (Koop et al., 2018: 19–23). Like Fenno ( 2003), we conceive of representation as a series of connections that MPs develop and nurture between themselves and their constituents. In doing so, we rely on the Representational Connections Framework (RCF) developed by Koop, Bastedo and Blidook ( 2018) in their observational study of Canadian MPs. Here, we explore how the pandemic has affected the representational activities of individual MPs. The COVID-19 pandemic has necessarily affected the operation of Canada's Parliament and, thus, the activities of Members of Parliament (MPs) (Malloy, 2020 Rayment and VandenBeukel, 2020).
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