Understanding and Reducing Biases in Elite Beliefs About the Electorate

Abstract

To be responsive, politicians have to rely on beliefs about public will. Previous research suggests that perceptions of public opinion are often distorted. However, it remains unclear (1) why reelection-seeking officials misperceive public preferences and (2) how to mitigate these distorted beliefs. I argue that misperceptions result from unequal exposure to different subconstituencies and a tendency of legislators to project their own preferences on voters. I find support for these arguments in a six-wave panel of Swedish MPs combined with mass surveys. Elite beliefs disproportionately reflect the preferences of privileged voters and the personal positions of legislators. Additionally, an experiment with Swiss representatives leveraging real political events reveals how misperceptions can be reduced by encouraging a more balanced exposure to voters. The study concludes that economic and political inequalities are rooted in elite beliefs about the electorate and reveals ways to bolster the links between voters and their representatives.

Understanding MPs’ perceptions of party voters’ opinion in Western democracies

“…However, considering an MP's perception of what the general population wants is also relevant in proportional systems where MPs do take their potential voters into account too. Indeed, as demonstrated by Esaiasson and Holmberg (1996) for the case of Sweden, representative democracy is not only about party politics (see also Pereira 2021).…”

“…This latter finding can be explained by more general psychological and cognitive mechanisms: politicians believe that they have more expertise in an area than they actually do (Fisher and Keil 2016;Dunning 2011) and project their own opinion onto others (Holmberg 1999). A recent experimental study underlines this point: In areas of expertise, Swedish MPs tend to be more close-minded and dogmatic and, thus, disregard information from voters who have diverging opinions (Pereira and Öhberg, 2021;Pereira 2021) illustrating the prevalence of the 'curse of expertise' (Fisher and Keil 2016). Another explanation can be that MPs who specialise in specific policy domains are strongly influenced by the positions voiced within a closed community.…”

“…They show that MPs' perceptions of the electorate's opinion are generally not very accurate. This misperception might be due to 'wishful thinking' , with MPs tending to project their own opinions onto voters (Holmberg 1999), to ideological orientation (Belchior 2014), to selective information sources such as vocal citizens and interest groups (Broockman and Skovron 2018;Pereira 2021; see also Hertel-Fernandez et al 2019 for a similar finding about the biased misperceptions of US Congressional staffers), or to the MPs' low receptivity of factual information about constituents' preferences (Kalla and Porter 2020). However, MPs' estimates become more accurate when voters have homogeneous preferences on the policy issue at stake (Clausen et al 1983) and when this issue is salient or 'politically charged' (Hedlund and Friesema 1972).…”

Does Direct Democracy Enhance Politicians’ Perceptions of Constituents’ Opinions? Evidence from Switzerland

“…We know of one study that investigates MPs' perceptions of public opinion in the context of direct democracy using an actual vote (Pereira, 2021). However, the focus of our paper -to investigate the informational function of direct democracy instruments -requires us to compare respondents' perceptions on issues that have already been subjected to a vote in recent years to those that have not.…”

Heuristics and policy responsiveness: a research agenda

“…Several studies have found that politicians are poor at estimating levels of public support for policy positions (e.g. Broockman and Skovron 2018 ; Pereira 2021 ). Judgments of voters’ likely reactions typically need to be made either under time and information constraints (e.g., Walgrave and Dejaeghere 2017 ) or in a context of information overload (Baumgartner and Jones 2015 ); exactly the conditions under which the use of heuristics is likely.…”