Politicians need to have a good understanding of which issues matters most to voters. Chris Butler reports from a recent survey of politicians that reveals that while they have a reasonable understanding of which issues matter, there are also common reasons why they make mistakes that have consequences for representation
Representing voters is a tricky task for politicians. Voters do not all share the same preferences. Some make their voices heard more than others, while the media are also more likely to highlight certain claims. Lobbying organisations commission surveys designed to show support for their positions. In an information-rich world, politicians can be overwhelmed with signals about what the public think.
However, politicians need to have a good grasp of public opinion to do their jobs well. Even if they do not want to respond to majority opinion on every issue, they need to have a good understanding of public sentiment so that they can explain why they are making their decisions.
In recent years, several major studies have surveyed politicians to assess how well they understand public opinion. These studies have consistently found that politicians’ on-the-spot estimates of public opinion are no better than citizens’ estimates. Follow-up studies have failed to identify any patterns as to which politicians have a better grasp of public opinion. The only consistent finding is that politicians indulge in motivated reasoning, commonly assuming that more voters share their opinions than is actually the case.
But one of politicians’ most important judgements of public opinion is assessing which issues matter most to voters. This matters for two main reasons. Firstly, part of good representation involves taking action on the issues that voters are most concerned about. Secondly, knowing which issues are most important to voters helps representatives understand when it is riskier to defy majority public opinion.
However, until recently we knew next to nothing about how well politicians understand which issues matter to voters. In part, this is because it is tricky to measure. For example asking politicians to estimate how important voters say an issue is to them on a 0–10 scale is not particularly insightful; what does rating an issue as being '9 out of 10 important' mean to different people?
In a recent study, Julie Sevenans, Pirmin Bundi, Frédéric Varone, Stefaan Walgrave and I took on this challenge by asking politicians to estimate the proportion of people who expressed an opinion on an issue, i.e. that didn’t respond with ‘Don’t Know’. Previous research has established that this is a reasonable proxy for issue importance – the more people who have an opinion on an issue, the more people think it is important, and the more people will take parties’ positions on that issue into consideration when deciding who to vote for.
Encouragingly, over two-thirds of the time politicians correctly guessed which of a pair of issues was more important to voters, indicating a fairly good grasp of knowing which issues matter most to voters. However, politicians routinely underestimated how many voters would express an opinion on an issue. This may reflect a healthy scepticism with opinion polling – some people only form an opinion on an issue when asked.
Politicians were more likely to misidentify which issue was more important, or to assume that fewer people had an opinion, in two scenarios. Firstly, when the issue was of less importance to politicians themselves, they assumed that voters were also less likely to care about it.
Secondly, when politicians acknowledged that voters disagreed with them on an issue, they were more likely to underestimate its importance. Imagine you’re a politician and you feel strongly about something but notice that voters tend to disagree with you. If you want to stick to your convictions, you’re going to have to expend considerable effort on explaining your decision. It is comforting, therefore, to imagine that this issue is not as important to voters as they claim it is, and that sticking to your convictions will thus not be so electorally risky.
In my previous work, I found that political decision-makers did indeed use this line of reasoning when they took unpopular decisions. For example, when, in 2010, the Liberal Democrat party in the UK made a notorious U-turn on their pledge not to increase tuition fees, many of those involved in the decision believed – despite the fact that the decision was clearly unpopular and led to well-attended student protests – voters would ultimately judge the party for its record on matters like the economy.
Overall then, while our evidence from surveying over 850 politicians in four countries is that they have good instincts on which issues matter most to voters, they also make mistakes as a result of motivated reasoning. This could be because they want to believe that voters find the same issues important, or because they don't want to hold different views from voters on important issues.
This may help to explain why governments sometimes to get it wrong. They may pursue agendas that voters are less concerned about in the false belief that voters share the same sense of what is important as politicians. And they may also take unpopular decisions on issues that matter to voters, simply because they have convinced themselves that voters care less about those issues.
