Members of Parliament are unique among elite groups for their capacity to affect substantial political outcomes with far-reaching consequences locally, nationally and internationally. Even backbench MPs, who are often callously cast as party political lobby fodder, play an important role in moulding crucial policy decisions, in assuming the most influential roles in the state (either as a pool of potential recruits for the executive or by granting and withdrawing support for the government of the day), and in helping to design and reform the institutional nature of the state (see also Best and Vogel, 2018). However, existing studies of the UK Parliament and other legislatures around the world have only given limited attention to the individual, psychological characteristics of those actors who hold elected office and exercise these powers. Chapter 1 argued at some length that it is these ‘questions of character’ that actually underpin much of the anti-political sentiment, and thus democratic malaise, that academics and journalists have spent so much time discussing in recent years or even decades. As Allen and Cairney (2015, p 6) conclude, ‘many of the complaints put at the door of the ‘political class’ relate to Westminster politics and those with governing power or influence’. In attempting to fill this gap in our understanding of politicians, and in the public understanding of politics more broadly, this chapter analyses the Basic Human Values (Schwartz, 1992) of those individuals ‘in the arena’; as Theodore Roosevelt (1910) famously put it, those ‘who err, who come short again and again … but who do actually strive to do the deeds’.

Before turning to examine the basic values of our elected representatives, it is worth reiterating why exactly it matters who our politicians are. Contra to the broader questions of anti-politics discussed in Chapter 1, the focus here is on the concept and institutions of democratic representation and, more precisely, the transfer of power from principal to agent that it entails.