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How Public Opinion Information Changes Politicians’ Opinions and Behavior

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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.

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Data availability

The data were collected in the framework of the POLPOP project. POLPOP is a transnational project examining the perceptual accuracy of politicians in four countries. It was initiated by Stefaan Walgrave from the University of Antwerp (Flanders, Belgium). Flemish funding comes from the national science foundation (FWO) with grant number G012517N. The following people were part of the Flemish POLPOP team: Stefaan Walgrave, Julie Sevenans, Pauline Ketelaars, Karolin Soontjens, Kirsten Van Camp and Arno Jansen.

Notes

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

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

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

  5. 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.

  6. 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).

  7. Calculated via the medeff command in Stata.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the members of M2P (University of Antwerp) and Stuart Soroka (University of Michigan) for their useful comments on earlier versions of the paper.

Funding

While conducting this research, the author was a postdoctoral researcher of the FWO (Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek Vlaanderen) in research group M2P (Media, Movements & Politics) at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). Grantee number: 12X6218N.

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  1. Department of Political Science, University of Antwerp, Sint-Jacobstraat 2, 2000, Antwerpen, Belgium

    Julie Sevenans

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Correspondence to Julie Sevenans.

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Replication

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

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Sevenans, J. How Public Opinion Information Changes Politicians’ Opinions and Behavior. Polit Behav 43, 1801–1823 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09715-9

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