The Palgrave Handbook of Political Elites by Heinrich Best & John Higley

Author:Heinrich Best & John Higley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

The Individual Representation of Regional Interests and the Causal Flow Between Public Opinion and Public Policy

To determine the distinctiveness of representative elites compared to other sectors of political elites, the prevalent approach is to analyze how each type of representative elites takes the electorate into account and to identify the degree of congruence between representative elites and citizens regarding political perceptions, values and attitudes. Miller and Stokes (1963) introduced the congruence approach in their pioneering work on individual constituency representation. Adopting this approach, research on the United States has repeatedly confirmed that the degree of competition in regional constituencies between representative elites and their contenders does not usually increase issue congruence with their constituents (Brunell and Buchler 2009). This evidence contravenes the expectation that, because the likelihood of electoral defeat increases with intensified competition, the latter will be an incentive for representative elites to implement the preferences of their constituents as policies (Fiorina 1973). This unexpected result was explained by the fact that marginal districts are characterized by the attitude heterogeneity of their constituents, which motivates representative elites to choose to be responsive to specific subgroups of the electorate, to manipulate the preferences of their constituents, or to refuse to take them into account at all (Gerber and Lewis 2004; Harden and Carsey 2012). Otherwise, secure districts show homogeneous attitude patterns and send clear cues about voters’ preferences. These results show that, where their principals exhibit clear preferences, elites’ autonomy is more constrained than in case of unclear or even contradictory preferences.

Whereas research into individual constituency representation asks if “taking into account” establishes a link between the preferences of the electorate and the attitudes and behavior of individual representative elites, the public-opinion/public-policy nexus asks whether voters get the policy they demand or one that at least comes close to their preferences. These approaches contribute to the study of representative elites because they explicitly deal with whether public opinion is a cause or a consequence of public policy, thereby being an outcome of elite behavior.

Work on the public-opinion/public-policy nexus builds on extensive empirical evidence demonstrating the substantial degree of congruence between majority opinion and predominant policies in Western democracies (Shapiro 2011). Dynamic perspectives demonstrate that changes in public opinion are more often than not accompanied by subsequent policy changes. However, this chronological proximity may or may not be interpreted as a bottom-up influence of the electorate, because representative elites may initially attempt to change public opinion in order to generate political support for subsequent policy changes. This exogenous character of individual and public opinion and the role representative elites play in molding it is addressed in research on opinion molding (Druckman 2014). Here, it has been shown that if they are not personally affected, citizens rely on information shortcuts and evaluate the content of political messages on the basis of contextual information. Among other sources, these cues are provided by the personal traits of the messages’ senders, including those of representative elites (Boudreau and MacKenzie 2014; Kuklinski and Hurley 1994). The

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