In the US, you are able to contact state senators and representatives(at the very least, their office) concerning your political views and to see where the politician stands on certain issues. There’s currently a history teacher on Youtube livestreaming him contacting every senator.


29 comments

  1. You can call them, or write an email to them. On the website of _Folketinget_, the Danish parliament, ft.dk, you can find the information on all members of parliament. The regional councils and municipal councils have similar websites; perhaps not as modern and snazzy, but you can always find ways to contact elected representatives. That said, I don’t know of anyone, besides journalists, who do that; while we do have a system of local representation, with so-called “grand constituencies”—Denmark is divided into 10—most people don’t think of the members of parliament as local representatives, but rather as representatives of whatever party they are elected for. That said, while most people think of the MF’s as representatives of their parties, the MF’s are only accountable to themselves, i.e. not to their constituencies(we don’t have a recall model) and not to programs, parties or promises.

    So yea, you can call or write your representatives, but, at least at local level, it might be easier to just stick around the town hall and catch them after a meeting.

  2. Yes you can contact members of parliament and even of the federal council (our 7 member highest executive office). They all have point of contacts listed, actually thil is not only true for present members, but also past members (don’t know why you’d contact someone who was in parliament but isn’t anymore, but if you want to you can).

    Famously many Swiss politicians (both members of parliament and federal councilors) also use public transport to get to and from work, so I guess people also just randomly talk to them at train stations etc. That would be heavily frowned upon though.

  3. Yes we are able to contact our elected officials

    You can either send them a mail or you can also call the central Hotline of the Bundestag (our Parlament) and get connected directly to the office of the member of parliament you want to speak with.

    In most of the cases obviously you will talk with a member of their staff since they get Alot of calls but not so famous and known members of parliament often take time to talk to you personally.

    Furthermore we have an organization called Abgeordnetenwatch (members of parliament watch)
    They made it their mission the give transparency and support open dialog between members of parliament and the people

    They give people a platform to directly ask members of parliament questions openly and directly

    The organization has established itself over the years so much that alot of communication is through them

  4. Swiss politicians (at least the ones in the legislative branches) do not have offices like the politicians in the US. Switzerland has a unique system of militia-style parliamentarianism, which means that there are practically no professional politicians. Almost all politicians have regular jobs on the side where they earn most of their income and spend most of their working hours. Their political office is something they do as a hobby/side job. Consequently, the infrastructure for professional politicians doesn’t really exist, either. Most Swiss politicians answer calls and reply to emails personally. Having a secretary do this is unusual and having “staffers” like the politicians in the US is completely unheard of.

    So, if you’ve got something super important to say or ask your representatives, you can simply call them or write them an email. Doing this is very common, though. One important reason why it isn’t common is because we don’t have district-representatives like you do in the US.

    In America, every county is subdivided into districts and every district is represented by exactly one person. In Switzerland, by comparison, we use lists. Before an election, every party submits a list with, say, 60 candidates for the municipal/cantonal/federal parliament. If party A receives 20% of the vote, that means the top 12 candidates on their list become representatives. If the party wins 30% of the total vote, the top 18 candidates get to start their careers as politicians. Where exactly these candidates come from is irrelevant because they all represent the entire city. It’s also arbitrary because the order of the lists is chosen party-intern. So, whether Peter Smith is above or below Sarah Miller on the list is decided by the party; either through a democratic vote or by the president of the local party group. So, because we work with lists, we don’t have specific district representatives like you do in the US.

    If you want to know the specific positions of Swiss politicians on various issues, you can look up their Smartspider. It’s a website/diagram developed by Swiss universities. It works a bit like the political compass test but it’s far more accurate. Instead of locating people on a square marked left-right/progressive-conservative, the Smartspider focus on (I believe) 8 different topics. There’s immigration, environment & ecology, foreign policy, financial policy and so forth. You answer a quiz of about 100 questions and you get points for each of these 8 areas. In the end, you have a diagram that looks a bit like a spider web. The fun thing is that every person’s Smartspider is unique. The program is very popular, both among regular people and especially among politicians. Pretty much every Swiss politician and anyone who has ever run for office has their own Smartspider. So your voters can go on that website, type your name in the search box and look at the diagram. It won’t simply tell them how “left” or “conservative” you are, because those terms are very blurry and unclear. It will show you exactly that Peter Smith is very welcoming towards immigrants and supports climate change protection but wants a more protected market, while Sarah Miller agrees with him on the immigration stuff but she wants a little less environmental protections and she supports a more free/laissez-faire market model.

  6. Of course, it’s necessary for a democratic system that there’s some way of getting in contact.

    In Sweden, like much of Europe, we don’t really have the concept of “your Senator” or “your Representative” as in the US. We have a proportional election system, and there’s no specific member of parliament representing my district or anything like that. But we can contact any member or their office by email, phone or letter. In practice of course the prominent officials (party leaders, fraction leaders, etc) don’t have the time to respond to messages personally, but if you contact a less prominent member you may even get a personal reply.

    Local politics are different in that most members of the municipal council have other jobs and only do politics on the side. The scale of local politics is much smaller, so if you reach out to someone with a relevant question, you’ll probably get a personal and meaningful answer.

  7. Of course you can. Go to the Parliaments website, click on the “Member and parties” tab and there you go. Click on the party you’re concerned about, or the specific member sitting for your region. They will have email and phone numbers on the page.

    Although there is no reason to contact specific representatives concerning say votes in Parliament about policy changes or law changes because for the most part they’ll always follow the party line and rarely step outside it because then they might be removed from the party list next election.

    What you really want to know is where that party you voted for stands on things and for that you usually don’t have to ask themselves. The press will ask them and report about it and so you can just read about it in the news.

  8. Yes, in the UK it’s possible to contact representatives from your local Councillor all the way up to your Member of Parliament.

    Most of them will have contact details published on [official websites](https://www.parliament.uk/get-involved/contact-an-mp-or-lord/contact-your-mp/), or there are [unofficial sites](https://www.writetothem.com) which will list which representatives you can contact.

    Personally speaking, members of my family have emailed, phoned and have even had [face to face meetings](https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/glossary/surgeries/) with all three of our local political representatives at different levels.

    From our local Councillor (responsible for matters in our village, eg roads, recycling etc), to our Member of Parliament in the UK Parliament, and also our “Assembly Member” (basically our area’s MP in the devolved Welsh Government).

  10. Well, some of them will interact with you if you curse them in social media. Otherwise you can just email them but you shouldn’t expect any answer/feedback.

  11. I just message them on Facebook. Well I did that once and got a reply so I assume it still works.

  12. yes, sometimes we see them walking through town, there is only one town so it is quite easy

  15. Of course, mails, social media, facebook comments etc.

    With some, you know it’s their PR team, but with a majority, it’s them

    Discussions in Facebook comments with politicians are really popular in Slovakia

    I mean that would be a terrible democracy if you couldn’t ask anyone anything, wouldn’t it?

  17. Yes, most of them at least. Many have websites and social accounts, there’s usually an office email you can contact. Ive contacted several officials, for different reasons completely, throughout the years. They, or their team, have always replied and in most cases took direct action.

  19. Yes, I know some of them personally.
    And like the person from Iceland said, I’ll most likely just send them a message through facebook. But that isn’t really that big of a brag, it’s almost inevitable when therebare only 50.000 people in the Faroe Islands

  20. I’ve seen that EU politicians are on the EU’s website and have their emails there. Have never heard of this in Italy specifically though.

  21. Our Prime Minister bicycles every day to his office. If you run quick enough, you can jump on the back of his bicycle and have a chat with him.

  22. It is very easy to contact politicians in Ireland. They are not in some ivory tower, kept away from the ordinary people. They are very close to the people. They have offices in the areas they represent. It is easy to contact those offices. Naturally they won’t be there all the time, but they do have regular clinics for people to go to see them. You will also see them out and about, like simply walking down the street. They aren’t all surrounded in security. The top politicians will have some, but even they will be seen out and about with the people. So it is very different in Ireland, compared to many countries.

  23. What elected officials… orz

    That aside, yes, there are technically ways – but most of the time there’s no point in expecting your message to reach them, or expecting them to give a damn in the first place. Although some mayors have open hours every month or so where you can go talk to them.

  24. Sure, president Niinistö usually walks his dog along Hietaniemi shore so you can talk him then if he’s not in a hurry.

  25. No. At best you’ll be able to dig out someone’s number and no one will pick up, which is why this whole “call your representative” sounds extremely cringy to me.

  26. You can write them, send an email, contact them on social media or just visit them when they are at home.

  27. Belgium has a ton of governments, so it really depends on what you want to speak about.

    For most people, the Commune (sort of a weird municipal hybrid between a county and a city borough) is the most accessible form of local government. It has its own council with a mayor and aldermen/councillors.

    The other one you might contact a lot is the Region – *kinda* like a state. Belgium has 3 – Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels (which has 19 boroughs and functions *kinda* like Washington DC).

    Belgium uses proportional representation – so you can’t really say *this* person represents me like you can with a Congressperson or a Senator. More like a “this *council* represents me”.

    But I mean, yeah, every council and member of parliament has a phone number and an email address to get directly in touch, for sure. Some of them are particularly active on Twitter.

  29. Your best way to reach a national parliamentarian is to mail either them or the fraction.

    Dutch Parliament has neither the resources or the mandate to have a individual office for each parliamentarian ( it’s a proportional system with party lists), instead within a fraction different subjects ( for instance : healthcare, Defense ) are divided among the MP’s. If you’d contact let’s say the Green party’s Lisa Westerveld about something that’s unrelated to education , youth health care, childcare , media and Sport you’re probably going to get put through to one of her colleagues or get a response from one of the few fraction workers in conversation with everyone who touches that subject in the fraction.

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