https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3980-3690
![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
A growing body of research has documented political inequality along class lines at different stages of the representation process. This article contributes to our understanding of unequal responsiveness and its causes with an in-depth study of Germany that investigates the link between preferences and policymakers’ decisions. Using an original dataset covering 746 survey questions on specific reform proposals from 1980 to 2013, we provide the first study of a European democracy that investigates whether responsiveness patterns vary between economic and cultural policies or different governing coalitions. We show that decisions are skewed towards upper occupational and educational groups, irrespective of policy type or government composition. These results advance the discussion of potential mechanisms for unequal responsiveness. As privileged groups are overrepresented in parliament, our findings support the argument that the social bias in the make-up of parliaments matters for substantive representation.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this article has been presented at the workshop on political inequality and democratic innovations at Villa Vigoni, Italy, in March 2017. We would like to thank the participants for their helpful comments. In addition, we want to thank the two anonymous reviewers, Larry Bartels, Natalie Giger, Mikael Persson and Jonas Pontusson for their valuable feedback and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See Beyer and Hänni (Citation2018) for a discussion of the conceptual and empirical differences between congruence and responsiveness.
2 For a critical discussion of the findings and estimation techniques, see e.g., Bashir (Citation2015), Enns (Citation2015), Soroka and Wlezien (Citation2008) and Gilens (Citation2009, Citation2015b).
3 As Page et al. (Citation2013) show, attitudes of the wealthy differ most pronouncedly from those of average citizens regarding spending on redistributive policies and social security programs.
4 One important exception is the study by O’Grady (Citation2019), who examines the political positions and roll-call votes of British labor party MPs from different occupational background in major welfare reforms.
5 As not every question could be assigned to one of the dimensions, the total number of cases is less than 746.
6 We hereafter refer to the cultural dimension as particularism vs universalism.
7 Our data also corroborate this pattern. Business owners and civil servants are the occupational groups with the highest incomes in the dataset (see Figure A4 in the Appendix).
10 The overall adoption rate in Germany is significantly higher than in similar data on the United States (Gilens, Citation2012) or the Netherlands (Schakel, Citation2019). This may be due to the timing of the polls. However, it is beyond the scope of this article to explain these cross-sectional differences. In any case, this difference is not expected to bias the results.
11 The implementation rates are roughly equal across both policy dimensions, as shown in the right panel of Figure A-2 in the Appendix.
12 Results for income groups are not reported here due to the low number of cases.
13 The somewhat lower level of statistical significance on the cultural policy dimension might be due to the lower number of cases.
14 These analyses deviate from the former because we use the two-year period of implementation here to ensure that the government coalition remains the same between the time the question was asked and implementation. However, this resulted in the exclusion of all cases from the years 1997, 2004 and 2012.
15 This result might be driven by the fact that the Red-Green government implemented a series of welfare retrenchment reforms, which the lower social classes strongly opposed. Under this government, 48 per cent of the questions that deal with public finance asked about expenditure cuts.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Lea Elsässer
Lea Elsässer is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Münster and the University of Duisburg-Essen.
Svenja Hense
Svenja Hense is a postdoctoral researcher at Goethe-University Frankfurt.
Armin Schäfer
Armin Schäfer is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Münster.