Abstract
This chapter deals with a central element of representative democracies: the representation of the citizens by legislators in parliament. The basic link for this relationship are elections. Critics argue it is especially the lower stratum of society that is participating less in elections and whose preferences subsequently become systematically less represented in parliament. So far, however, the plausibility of this argumentation has rarely been tested empirically. To close this gap, we are testing if less electoral participation of the lower stratum leads to a worse substantial representation of these citizens. By using survey data, we analyze whether the policy preferences of citizens are congruent with those of the elected.
We find that although belonging to a specific social stratum is not the defining concept for policy preferences, the lower stratum is still worse represented than the middle and upper strata in all eight parliaments under investigation. Its reduced level of electoral participation has indeed a modest impact on substantive representation. But the differences in the quality of representation are larger between countries as between the different social strata within countries. With respect to the level of individual parties, we see a similar picture: parties represent their voters from the middle and upper strata often slightly better than their voters from the lower strata. In summary, we cannot find a real crisis of substantial representation of the lower strata, but we can find a significant cross-country underrepresentation that—if it increases over time—has the potential to damage representative democracies.
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Notes
- 1.
These are, for example, the so-called social milieu models. The traditional indicators are supplemented by a number of indicators vertical to income and educational hierarchies. They include gender, age, ethnic and regional origin, and marital status (Geißler 2010, 42). Second, there are the social milieu models, which add subjective indicators such as lifestyles and life attitudes to the objective ones (ibid., 45). A classical example of such a classification is the Sinus-Milieus, where on a second axis, traditionalists, modernizers, individualists, and people open to reorientation are distinguished from one another (SINUS 2011, 14). A recent model focuses on inclusion and exclusion. In its basic form, it is bipolar in structure, concentrating on a small group of extremely disadvantaged people who have lost their place in society through unemployment, poverty, a lack of prospects, and a damaged self-image (Geißler 2010, 49).
- 2.
Huber and Powell (1994), too, identify this link between MP preferences and their later action as the idea behind the proportionate influence vision. However, the study points in a somewhat different direction than ours, so that their findings cannot be directly transferred. But they are a further indication that there is good reason to posit a link between MP preferences and parliamentary output.
- 3.
In cases where surveys were carried out on two elections in a country, we used data that comes from the same legislative period as the data on parliamentarians.
- 4.
Members of regional and national parliaments were asked to participate in the study. For the following analysis, only data on members of national parliaments were used.
- 5.
Since the income variable states only quintiles and no exact household incomes, the mean income within the quintile is estimated, and for each respondent, this value is divided by the number of household members.
- 6.
In the case of four countries (Netherlands, Norway, Austria, Switzerland), no satisfactory categorization was possible because of the way these categories have been aggregated by the CSES country experts. For these four countries, the income variable was used more restrictively in defining classes in order to take account of differences in the coding of educational qualifications.
- 7.
This method is not influenced by whether attitudes are normally distributed, because it takes the complete distribution into account and not only aggregated values (Golder and Stramski 2010, 95). Moreover, since all the distributions used in this analysis overlap, this formula, slightly simplified in comparison to the use of differences of cumulative distribution functions, can be used.
- 8.
We have not for all respondents observations on all variables used in this analysis. These citizens are therefore excluded from the study. Most of the answers that are lacking are to questions on income and on left-right self-positioning. The number of cases is therefore considerably reduced especially for Portugal and Ireland. And in the party-specific analysis in Sect. 6.3, only respondents who state their concrete choice of party could be taken into consideration.
- 9.
“Some people would like to see lower taxes even if that means some reduction in health, education, and social benefits; others would like to see more government spending on health, education, and social benefits even if it means some increases in taxes.” (11-point scale).
- 10.
“Should more nuclear power stations be built or should all nuclear power stations be closed down today?” (11-point scale).
- 11.
“We now turn to the issue of immigration. Should laws on immigration be relaxed or be made tougher?” (11-point scale).
- 12.
Individual citizens are assigned to the party which they stated they voted for at the last election (variable C3023_LH_PL in CSES).
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Lehmann, P., Regel, S., Schlote, S. (2018). Inequality in Political Representation: Is the Lower Social Stratum Worse Represented?. In: Merkel, W., Kneip, S. (eds) Democracy and Crisis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72559-8_6
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