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 qth 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
$n^{-1}$.