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Political Behavior

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27.04.2021 | Original Paper

How Public Opinion Information Changes Politicians’ Opinions and Behavior

verfasst von: Julie Sevenans

Erschienen in: Political Behavior | Ausgabe 4/2021

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Abstract

Numerous representation studies suggest that political elites are responsive to the expressed preferences of their voters, but scholars in the field have called for experimental research on the topic to shed light on the underlying mechanisms. This paper responds to this call. Results from a survey experiment with members of parliament in Belgium show, for the first time, that an important mechanism driving responsiveness is opinion adaptation by political elites. Just like ‘ordinary’ citizens adapt their opinions when learning where their preferred party stands on an issue, politicians update their position when learning that it opposes the preferences of a majority of their electorate. This implies that elite responsiveness involves less discord between politicians’ own preferences and voter preferences than is often assumed.

Vorheriger Artikel Using a Continuous Measure of Genderedness to Assess Sex Differences in the Attitudes of the Political Elite

Nächster Artikel Correction to: Issue Voting and Government Responsiveness to Policy Preferences

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Note that there is some ambiguity in the literature about how ‘responsiveness’ and ‘congruence’ are conceptualized and measured (for an extensive discussion, see Beyer and Hänni 2018). In line with most of the literature, we see responsiveness as a dynamic, causal process where politicians bring their behavior closer to what the majority of the voters wants. Ideally, they end up in line with the preferences of this majority, hence establishing congruence.

The first path represents how constituencies exert control by electing elites who share their preferences—which we labeled ‘representation through correct voting’ above. The arrows corresponding to this path (starting with an arrow from voter’s attitude to representative’s attitude) are not shown in Fig. 1.

The files for replication are published on Dataverse: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/RTUBVV

A balance test confirms that the randomization succeeded on characteristics like gender, age, parliamentary experience, party and parliament (regional/federal); see Online Appendix 2.

We asked politicians to judge two additional scenarios (about how they would communicate towards a journalist and a voter respectively), but as these items do not deal with how politicians represent voters substantively they are not discussed here.

Note that these differences are not related to our experimental manipulation: the party position estimations of the treatment group are not significantly higher (nor lower) than the estimations of the control group (t = -.52; p = .603).

Calculated via the medeff command in Stata.

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Titel: How Public Opinion Information Changes Politicians’ Opinions and Behavior
verfasst von: Julie Sevenans
Publikationsdatum: 27.04.2021
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Political Behavior / Ausgabe 4/2021
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09715-9

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