Affluence and Congruence: Unequal Representation around the World

Abstract

Do elected representatives reflect the preferences of the citizens they represent? Recent studies from the U.S. and a number of other democracies have found that legislators tend to represent better the preferences of affluent citizens. But we still know little about how widespread this bias is. To answer this question, we gathered every publicly available survey of elected representatives in the world and matched it with mass survey data. Our dataset consists of 92,000 elite observations and 3.9 million citizen observations spread across 565 country-years, 52 individual countries, and 33 years. Using a variety of methods, we find that around the world, legislators' preferences are consistently more congruent with those of affluent citizens. However, we also find that this inequality varies substantially by issue domain: while the affluent are better represented on economic issues, the poor seem to be over-represented on cultural issues.

Do Disabled Candidates Represent Disabled Citizens?

“…It draws attention to the fact that the measures we use to study social group representation have strong implications for our conclusions. The distinction between preference gaps and congruence gaps should thus be added to existing discussions of how to conceptualize and measure representation (for example, Golder and Stramski 2010; Lupu and Warner 2020).…”

“…It draws attention to the fact that the measures we use to study social group representation have strong implications for our conclusions. The distinction between preference gaps and congruence gaps should thus be added to existing discussions of how to conceptualize and measure representation (for example, Golder and Stramski 2010;Lupu and Warner 2020). This discussion will involve normative and theoretical considerations as well as empirical investigations, for instance into how different citizen-elite linkages influence the reflection of group preferences in policy and outcomes as well as citizens' political attitudes and behaviour.…”

“…Focusing only on representation within parties, I construct separate datasets for each party where the unit of analysis is a voter–candidate dyad. This approach has been used by Boas and Smith (2019) and Lupu and Warner (2017, 2020) to analyse mass–elite preference congruence and by Wüest and Pontusson (2018) to investigate whether voters of a particular social class are better represented by elites from that class. It allows us to analyse whether shared disability increases preference congruence between each voter and each candidate – that is, many-to-many congruence (Golder and Stramski 2010).…”

Merit and ressentiment: How to tackle the tyranny of merit

“…Liberalism, socialism, and democracy’s promises fall apart in the face of social inequality. Even in today’s liberal democratic social order, people in all practical senses of the term are not each other’s equals, socially nor economically, do not have an equal shot at success, and in politics, rarely have an equal voice in important matters (Bartels, 2010; Cagé, 2020; Lupu and Warner, 2021; Schakel et al, 2020). As ter Braak argued, these ideologies proffer the right to everything, but all too often leave people empty-handed.…”

The party road to representation: Unequal responsiveness in party platforms

“…The resulting dataset covers a substantial period of time, 1985–2017, in a substantial swath of 39 countries – a larger empirical sample than virtually all studies of unequal representation (cf. Lupu & Warner, 2020).…”