Let
$\Gamma _{g}$
be the fundamental group of a closed connected orientable surface of genus
$g\geq 2$
. We develop a new method for integrating over the representation space
$\mathbb {X}_{g,n}=\mathrm {Hom}(\Gamma _{g},S_{n})$
, where
$S_{n}$
is the symmetric group of permutations of
$\{1,\ldots ,n\}$
. Equivalently, this is the space of all vertex-labeled, n-sheeted covering spaces of the closed surface of genus g.
Given
$\phi \in \mathbb {X}_{g,n}$
and
$\gamma \in \Gamma _{g}$
, we let
$\mathsf {fix}_{\gamma }(\phi )$
be the number of fixed points of the permutation
$\phi (\gamma )$
. The function
$\mathsf {fix}_{\gamma }$
is a special case of a natural family of functions on
$\mathbb {X}_{g,n}$
called Wilson loops. Our new methodology leads to an asymptotic formula, as
$n\to \infty $
, for the expectation of
$\mathsf {fix}_{\gamma }$
with respect to the uniform probability measure on
$\mathbb {X}_{g,n}$
, which is denoted by
$\mathbb {E}_{g,n}[\mathsf {fix}_{\gamma }]$
. We prove that if
$\gamma \in \Gamma _{g}$
is not the identity and q is maximal such that
$\gamma $
is a q
th power in
$\Gamma _{g}$
, then
$$\begin{align*}\mathbb{E}_{g,n}\left[\mathsf{fix}_{\gamma}\right]=d(q)+O(n^{-1}) \end{align*}$$
as
$n\to \infty $
, where
$d\left (q\right )$
is the number of divisors of q. Even the weaker corollary that
$\mathbb {E}_{g,n}[\mathsf {fix}_{\gamma }]=o(n)$
as
$n\to \infty $
is a new result of this paper. We also prove that
$\mathbb {E}_{g,n}[\mathsf {fix}_{\gamma }]$
can be approximated to any order
$O(n^{-M})$
by a polynomial in
$n^{-1}$
.