The Awareness Paradox: (Why) Politicians Overestimate Citizens’ Awareness of Parliamentary Questions and Party Initiatives

ABSTRACT

If politicians believe they will be rewarded for responsive behaviour at the ballot and punished for the opposite, they are disciplined to follow-up on the public’s desires. That the treat of electoral accountability prompts re-election minded politicians to act in line with the public’s wishes, vitally hinges on the assumption that politicians feel monitored in the first place. To tunderstand how this precondition for anticipatory representation works in reality, this article examines politicians’ perceptions of voters awareness of party initiatives and parliamentary questions. Quantitative and qualitative survey evidence collected among Belgian Members of Parliament (N = 164) shows that politicians consider citizens as rather uninformed about politics but, paradoxically, believe that some of them are aware of specific party initiatives and oral questions. Evidence on citizens’ actual knowledge shows that politicians strongly overestimate voter awareness. Why is that? From their reflections, we learn that MPs overgeneralise feedback they receive from engaged citizens, leaving them with a biased image of how aware voters actually are. Also, the exceptionally of gaining visibility with their work causes politicians to overestimate the scope of awareness when they are covered in the media, receive reactions on their social media accounts or simply work on salient topics.

KEYWORDS:

• Anticipatory representation
• elite perceptions
• mixed methods
• parliamentary initiatives
• perceived awareness

Acknowledgements

The author wants to thank Stefaan Walgrave, Julie Sevenans, Pauline Ketelaars, Kirsten Van Camp and Arno Jansen for their help with the data collection.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Belgium is a federal state, with competences on the national and the subnational level. Both the Federal and the Flemish parliament are elected based on a system of open proportional representation.

2 These data were gathered in the framework of the POLPOP-project in Flanders, led by Stefaan Walgrave from the University of Antwerp (Flanders, Belgium), with funding from the national science foundation (FWO number G012517N).

3 SSI (now called Dynata – see https://www.dynata.com/) has its own online panel from which they sampled 2389 citizens, enforcing quota on gender, age and educational level.

4 During the plenary sessions of both the Flemish and the Federal parliament, MPs get the opportunity to ask questions about topical debates. It is the most visible meeting in parliament as part of it is broadcasted live on television. While there are differences in how often MPs ask questions (see Dandoy, 2011), all MPs use the plenary session to gain some visibility and, importantly, to put issues on the agenda (Campbell & Zittel, 2020). Also, MPs mostly ask questions about their field of expertise.

5 Importantly, missing answers are randomly distributed: a (logistic) regression analysis shows there are no significant differences according to governmental level, years of parliamentary experience or gender, nor are there systematic differences in non-response according to who conducted the interviews. Also, there is no self-selection bias: politicians who did estimate voter awareness on oral questions hold similar beliefs on party initiative awareness compared to their colleagues who did not answer this question.

6 SSI (now Dynata) was asked to contact respondents from the previous survey wave, applying quota on age, gender and educational level. Fifty percent of the respondents were willing to collaborate again.

7 Missing values for this question stem from the fact that some politicians did not have enough time to complete the open-ended questionnaire.

8 From their answers, it becomes clear that some politicians have difficulties estimating percentages, which manifests itself when they first provide an absolute number and later turn this into an inaccurate (too high) percentage.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research (FWO) [grant number G012517N].

Notes on contributors

Karolin Soontjens

Karolin Soontjens is a doctoral candidate financed by the FWO (grant number 11G8821N). She works at the research unit Media, Movements & Politics (M2P) in the Department of Political Science at the University of Antwerp, Email address [[email protected]]