Knowledge of what voters prefer is central to several theories of democratic representation and accountability. Despite this, we know little in a comparative sense of how well politicians know citizens' policy preferences. We present results from a study of 866 politicians in four countries. Politicians were asked to estimate the percentage of public support for various policy proposals. Comparing more than 10,000 estimations with actual levels of public support, we conclude that politicians are quite inaccurate estimators of people's preferences. They make large errors and even regularly misperceive what a majority of the voters wants. Politicians are hardly better at estimating public preferences than ordinary citizens. They not only misperceive the preferences of the general public but also the preferences of their own partisan electorate. Politicians are not the experts of public opinion we expect them to be.

Interpretive journalism is a journalistic style, characterized by reporters expressing their opinion, speculating about the future or explaining why something happened, without referring to verifiable facts or statements from news sources. Previous research upon this phenomenon is rather scattered, and inconclusive about the mechanisms underlying the presence of this journalistic style. This study aims to address both shortcomings by investigating newspaper coverage on coalition negotiations in Belgium. Conducting a quantitative, longitudinal content analysis, the evolution of interpretive journalism is studied between 1985 and 2014. Results show a remarkably strong, almost linear increase in the amount of interpretation in newspaper articles over a period of 29 years. Apart from the structural evolution in the media landscape that might cause this trend to occur, contextual determinants differing from one coalition formation to another turn out to be relevant as well. While interpretive journalism is on the rise, this is especially so when considering lengthy, difficult negotiations. This finding emphasizes the importance of contextual determinants-information accessibility in this case-in explaining journalistic trends.

If politicians believe they will be rewarded for responsive behaviour at the ballot and punished for doing 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 understand 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 MPs (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 over-generalize feedback they receive from informed 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.

Politicians care a lot about public opinion, they put great effort into getting to know what the people want. They almost constantly assess public opinion through a large variety of sources. And although most of them define themselves as trustees, in their actual day-to-day decision-making almost all politicians behave as delegates in the sense that they hardly ever deliberately cross public opinion but act in line with it (or act not at all). Notwithstanding their great focus on public opinion, politicians’ perceptions of what it is that the people want are remarkably inaccurate. They not only misjudge the share of people supporting specific policies, they also quite often position the majority on the wrong side of the debate. Their perceptions of public opinion are not only inaccurate, but most of the time biased as well. Politicians perceive the public to hold more right-wing positions than it actually does. Together, the inaccuracy and bias of politicians’ public opinion perceptions challenge the idea that elected representatives make representative democracy work by relying on their public opinion perceptions. In Flanders (in Belgium), the political system this book looks at, politicians do everything within their power to understand citizens’ preferences, but they do not always succeed in acting responsively because of their mistaken perceptions.

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