2020
DOI: 10.1177/0010414020957673
|View full text |Cite
|
Sign up to set email alerts
|

The Representation Gap and Political Sophistication: A Contrarian Perspective

Abstract: Political behavior research persistently questions the ability of the average citizen to make voting choices that accurately represent their political views. We argue that voters’ choices should be judged by the outcome of the choices, and not the decision-making process. The representation gap measures the policy agreement between voters and their chosen party using data from the 2014 European Election Study and the Chapel Hill Experts Survey. We consider whether the political sophistication of individual vot… Show more

Help me understand this report

Search citation statements

Order By: Relevance

Paper Sections

Select...
2
1
1
1

Citation Types

0
7
0
2

Year Published

2021
2021
2024
2024

Publication Types

Select...
7
1

Relationship

0
8

Authors

Journals

citations
Cited by 12 publications
(9 citation statements)
references
References 55 publications
(65 reference statements)
0
7
0
2
Order By: Relevance
“…Whereas voters can evaluate the government's current performance in office based on observed or mediatized outputs such as economic indicators, general or personal welfare, et cetera, they tend to have less information on opposition parties and need to rely on other sources to evaluate them (Butt 2006;Lachat and Wagner 2018). However, recent evidence suggests that voters are more adept at finding the political information most useful to them in forming a vote choice than previously thought (Dalton 2021;Fortunato and Stevenson 2021;Seeberg 2020). Therefore, we may expect that voters will be attentive to informative cues from opposition parties.…”
Section: Parliamentary Opposition and Retrospective Votingmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Whereas voters can evaluate the government's current performance in office based on observed or mediatized outputs such as economic indicators, general or personal welfare, et cetera, they tend to have less information on opposition parties and need to rely on other sources to evaluate them (Butt 2006;Lachat and Wagner 2018). However, recent evidence suggests that voters are more adept at finding the political information most useful to them in forming a vote choice than previously thought (Dalton 2021;Fortunato and Stevenson 2021;Seeberg 2020). Therefore, we may expect that voters will be attentive to informative cues from opposition parties.…”
Section: Parliamentary Opposition and Retrospective Votingmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Further, political sophistication has recently found remarkable success in the field of political communication and public opinion, where it has been studied in relation to resistance to fake news (Weitz-Shapiro and Winters, 2017; Vegetti and Mancosu, 2020), exposure to news and social cues (Danckert et al, 2017; Kim, 2019), and the type of language used on social media (Sterling and Jost, 2018). In addition, recent research has focused on the relationship between political sophistication and democratic functioning, exploring its effects on partisan bias (Patkós and Szántó, 2021), representation gap (Boonen et al, 2017; Dalton, 2021), and political intolerance (Gibson et al, 2020). These recent research developments in the literature concerning political sophistication have two main features.…”
Section: What Happened Next?mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Se parte de la premisa de que la representación política, por su propia naturaleza, siempre es imperfecta. La correspondencia entre las demandas políticas ciudadanas y la oferta de los partidos políticos también presenta, por necesidad, desajustes o fallas, generado una brecha de representación (Dalton, 2021) que constituye uno de los principales objetos de interés en esta investigación. Sobre la base de que las dimensiones que partidos y ciudadanos utilizan para estructurar sus orientaciones políticas son similares, algo confirmado por investigaciones como las de Rosset y Lutz (2016), cabría esperar que cambios en las preferencias temáticas u opináticas de la ciudadanía se correspondan con cambios en la oferta de los partidos políticos, produciéndose un ajuste continuo y dinámico, aunque con relativo retardo.…”
Section: Representaci óN Soci Alunclassified
“…Dicho de otro modo, se mantiene abierto en el debate académico si son las creencias, actitudes y opiniones de la ciudadanía las que modifican la oferta política, o si bien es la conformación concreta de un sistema de partidos en el arco ideológico el que moldea la forma en que los sujetos piensan su identificación ideológica. Aunque las implicaciones de la identificación con los partidos en la elección del voto pueden ser sólidas, las relaciones entre identificación partidista y representación política son más complejas (Dalton, 2021) y presentan resultados ambivalentes en la producción académica. La investigación en este campo lleva ya más de 50 años discutiendo si los partidos dirigen, si por el contrario siguen a la ciudadanía para alcanzar un entorno satisfactorio de representación política (Leeper & Slothuus, 2014), o si simplemente estamos ante un mercado de posiciones ideológicas en el que oferta (de los partidos) y demanda (de los ciudadanos) se encuentran, extendiendo este ejercicio en el tiempo primordialmente a través de los ciclos electorales.…”
Section: Representaci óN Soci Alunclassified