Ideological congruence and socio-economic inequality

Abstract

This study examines whether or not political representation in the Netherlands is biased toward the rich and higher educated by comparing the political orientations of members of parliament to those of the electorate. The analyses reveal stark differences in the representation of different socio-economic groups. The political views of elected national representatives are far more similar to those of rich, higher educated citizens than to those with less income and education. Moreover, a longitudinal analysis reveals that inequalities in political representation have actually grown in recent years. We also show that the use of measures of ideological self-identification might to lead to highly misleading results regarding the nature of political representation as opposed to the use of issue items. We conclude that, despite a highly proportional electoral system, the views which are represented in the Dutch lower house of parliament contain major distortions of the views of the broader electorate.

Democracy or Oligarchy? Unequal Representation of Income Groups in European Institutions

“…Similar findings emerge from studies focusing on a diverse set of European countries, including relatively developed and rich states such as Sweden (Persson & Gilljam, 2019), Germany (Elsässer, Hense, & Schäfer, 2017) and the Netherlands (Schakel, 2019). Besides these case studies, comparative research has also revealed that congruence between citizens and policymakers is often tilted towards the more affluent in European societies (e.g., Peters & Ensink, 2015;Rosset et al, 2013;Schakel & Hakhverdian, 2018). On the basis of national-level evidence from both sides of the Atlantic, therefore, unequal representation seems to be a widespread phenomenon.…”

The Educational Gradient in Trust in Politicians in the Netherlands: A Status-Based Cultural Conflict

“…First, in order to scrutinize our theory empirically, we focused on behaviors and attitudes that are undeniably riddled with notions of superiority and inferiority in the Dutch context: highbrow cultural consumption and cultural liberalism. Nevertheless, when it comes to the latter, the survey data available do not allow us to systematically disentangle the effect of superiority signaling or finger-wagging from so-called ideological incongruence, i.e., a mismatch in policy preferences between establishment politicians and the average less-educated citizen, which is especially salient concerning cultural liberalism (Schakel and Hakhverdian 2018;Van Ditmars and De Lange 2018). The fact that our findings for highbrow cultural consumption and cultural liberalism are very similar already suggests that there is more to the latter than simple ideological incongruence.…”

Electoral Systems and Policy Congruence

“…Another important avenue to examine in future work relates to inequality in policy representation. Several studies indicate the presence of discrimination in representation whether in terms of socio-economic groups (Bartels, 2008;Gilens, 2012;Schakel and Hakhverdian, 2018), gender (Kittilson, 2006;Tremblay, 2008;Wängnerud, 2009) or ethnic groups (Butler and Broockman, 2011;Griffin and Newman, 2008). While our primary interest in the article was to examine the role of electoral institutions for policy congruence, our research design would allow examining possible inequality in policy representation.…”