Understanding MPs’ perceptions of party voters’ opinion in Western democracies

Abstract

The ability of Members of Parliament (MPs) to know the policy preferences of their party voters is a precondition for substantive representation. This study investigates whether MPs’ perceptions of their party voters’ opinions are more accurate with policy statements on which they are competent—namely, those that are owned by their party and in which the MPs have specialised. It combines unique data from citizen surveys and face-to-face meetings with 367 MPs in Belgium, Canada, Germany and Switzerland. Both citizens and MPs evaluated the same statements, and MPs also estimated the support for each statement among their party voters. The comparison of party voters’ preferences and MPs’ estimations shows that MPs are more accurate on statements owned by their party, but not on issues they themselves specialise in through committee membership. Party issue ownership plays an important role in determining MPs’ perceptual accuracy and, hence, democratic representation.

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1940647 .

Keywords:

• Substantive representation
• party issue ownership
• legislative committee
• party electorate

Acknowledgements

We thank Steven Eichenberger, Anina Hanimann, Tim Mickler, Miguel Pereira, Adrien ‘Babysteps’ Petitpas, Jan Rosset and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on previous versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

A replication package with the data and syntax (Stata 14.0) used for this publication is available at the Yareta depository under the following DOI: https://doi.org/10.26037/yareta:ng5czaxdvreepoay6qw3mwpapa

Notes

1 The initial study included data from The Netherlands. Due to limited quality of the public opinion data we report the results from 30 MPs who evaluated 237 policy statements separately in Online Appendix H. Findings are in line with the overall conclusions of the main paper: party issue ownership is positively associated with perceptual accuracy but the coefficient does not reach significance (b = 4.98, p = .104, see Online Appendix H Table H4 for full results).

2 Data for the citizen and MP surveys were collected in the framework of the POLPOP project. POLPOP is a transnational collaboration examining the perceptual accuracy of politicians in five countries, initiated by Stefaan Walgrave. The Principal Investigators per country responsible for data collection and funding agencies were, for Flanders-Belgium: Stefaan Walgrave [FWO G012517N]; Wallonia and Brussels-Belgium: Jean-Benoit Pilet and Nathalie Brack [FNRS, T.0182.18]; Canada: Peter Loewen and Lior Sheffer [SSHRC Insight Grant for ‘The local parliament: voter preferences, local campaigns, and the parliamentary representation of voters’]; Germany: Christian Breunig and Stefanie Walter [partial funding by the Committee on Research at the University of Konstanz]; Netherlands: Rens Vliegenthart and Toni van der Meer; and Switzerland: Frédéric Varone and Luzia Helfer [SNSF #100017_172559].

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation under Grant 100017_172559.

Notes on contributors

Frédéric Varone

Frédéric Varone is Professor of Political Science at the University of Geneva. His research interests include comparative public policy, political representation, and interest groups. His most recent book is co-authored with Michael Hill: The Public Policy Process, 8th edition (Routledge 2021). [frédé[email protected]]

Luzia Helfer

Luzia Helfer is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Geneva. Her research interests include perceptions by legislators and their relationships with the public and media/journalists, mainly from a comparative perspective. [[email protected]]