In June 2017, Yvette started the project The Politics of Inequality. How Representative Democracy (Mal-) Functions in Europe, funded by the Trond Mohn Foundation and University of Bergen. This project deals with some of the most pressing issues facing democracies today: political inequality and the lack of representation. It investigates the state of representative democracy by studying citizen-state relations. More specifically, the project focuses on representation (do citizens get what they want?) and political equality (do people get what they want equally?).
Political equality is a fundamental condition for the existence of democracy, and representation structures the way democracies function. Research conducted within the project will further our understanding of how representative democracy works, will precisely diagnose its problems, and will identify ways of improving it.
It is particularly relevant to investigate this now: over the past years many European democracies have seen their participation, and political trust rates decline. International commitments have put governments under increased pressure to trade-off those commitments and public preferences. Moreover, the recent economic crisis has highlighted, and worsened, economic and gender inequalities. The project team explicitly studies whether these inequalities have translated in political inequalities, and will explain why this is so and how this dire situation can be addressed.
To deal with these issues, three approaches are used. First, the project examines representation and equality in Norway, a country that still has high levels of trust and which was less hit by the economic crisis than other European countries. This is achieved through surveys of Norwegian representatives (at all levels of government) and citizens. We investigate 1) the extent to which the preferences of parliamentarians and citizens align, 2) the extent to which this congruence results in public policies, 3) what inequalities exist in this relationship, and what causes them, and 4) how representatives perceive their role as representative. Second, temporal data from European countries are pooled together to 1) match people’s preferences to public policies (responsiveness), 2) identify whether responsiveness is different for men/women, and the rich/poor, and 3) to identify the structural causes of (unequal) responsiveness (e.g. veto points, electoral and party systems). Third, the team will uncover the sources of legitimacy within the democratic process, and find ways of improving it. This approach advances the collection of data on people’s preferences and ideas on what democracy should look like, and to what extent they deem the representative process legitimate. Moreover, in order to disentangle which aspects of representation promote the popular legitimacy of decisions, survey experiments are included.
Publications
Peters, Yvette (2021), “Social Policy Responsiveness in Multilevel Contexts: How Vertical Diffusion of Competences Affects the Opinion-Policy Link”, Governance
Peters, Yvette, Troy Saghaug Broderstad, Mari Skåra Helliesen, Arjan Hille Schakel, Marte Samuelsen Skogen (2021). Report PER 3. (on the PER web-site)
The Panel of Elected Representatives is an internet-based study of elected representatives at all political levels in Norway. The study deals with matters that are important to society, and for representation and democracy. The report sums up some of the results from the third round of the study to make them available for the participants and anyone else who might be interested.
Linde, J. & Y. Peters (2020) “Responsiveness, support, and responsibility: How democratic responsive-ness facilitates responsible government”, Party Politics
Representative democracy entails governments that are both responsive and responsible. Mair argued that political parties find it increasingly difficult to balance these two tasks. With an increase in international commitments and interdependence, governments cannot always follow the wishes of their citizens but need to be responsible instead. Our study examines the responsiveness–responsibility link from the angle of citizen perceptions. We argue that when governments are seen as responsive they build a “buffer” of support, allowing them to make decisions that are not necessarily responsive but possibly responsible. By being responsive, governments build a reservoir of goodwill, which they can use to survive more difficult periods. Using data from the 2012 European Social Survey, we test whether perceived responsiveness feeds into this reservoir and whether this reservoir consequently increases perceived responsibility. We find support for this link, suggesting that responsiveness and responsibility do not need to be trade-offs but can complement each other.
Fumarola, A. (2020). “The ‘sanction-policy’ linkage from the perspective of citizens and the role of the party system”. Acta Politica (Online first).
Research on dynamic representation stresses the effect of electoral incentives on politicians’ motivation to pursue policies in line with the preferences of the majority of the citizens. However, comparative research on the so-called sanction-policy link is still limited. The present article assesses the anticipatory effect of electoral accountability on government responsiveness from the perspective of citizens across 25 European countries. Results confirm the strong positive relationship between perceptions of electoral accountability and assessments of government responsiveness. Finally, the article examines the potential moderating effect of specific party system characteristics on people’s attitudes. Using multilevel models to analyse survey data from the sixth round of the European Social Survey, the study shows that the link between perceived accountability and responsiveness is conditional upon specific characteristics of the party system, namely fragmentation and volatility.
Fumarola, A. (2020). “Making the government accountable: rethinking immigration as an issue in the European Union“. European Politics and Society. (Online first).
In the last decades, European countries have experienced two relevant waves of immigration. These ‘immigration shocks’ have contributed to increase dramatically public attention on immigration issues but also to structure political competition on both the supply and the demand side of democratic representation. While immigration issue has been traditionally conceived as a positional issue, the consensus among voters and the policy convergence of mainstream parties seem to resemble Stokes’ model and competition is on a valence issue instead of position issue. Therefore, the present paper analyses whether and to what extent voters punish incumbents for high levels of immigration. Using data from the European Election Study, the analysis confirms that while voters perceiving high levels of immigration punish incumbents, performance voting depends on individual-level attributes such as partisanship and salience, but also country-level factors like the government clarity of responsibility. Finally, immigration performance voting is not moderated by issue ownership. However, the perceived competence of parties to manage immigration reveals a direct and independent effect on incumbent vote intention.
Peters, Yvette, Troy Saghaug Broderstad, Andrea Fumarola, Mari Skåra Helliesen (2020). Report PER 2. (on the PER web-site)
The Panel of Elected Representatives is an internet-based study of elected representatives at all political levels in Norway. The study deals with matters that are important to society, and for representation and democracy. The report sums up some of the results from the second round of the study to make them available for the participants and anyone else who might be interested.
Peters, Yvette, Troy Broderstad, Mari Helliesen (2019). Report PER 1 (on the PER website).
The Panel of Elected Representatives is an internet-based study of elected representatives at all political levels in Norway. The study deals with matters that are important to society, and for representation and democracy. The report sums up some of the results from the first round of the study to make them available for the participants and anyone else who might be interested.
Peters, Y. (2018), “Democratic representation and political inequality: How social differences translate into differential representation”, 16(3), French Politics
As a key subject within the field of political science, democratic representation has been studied widely. One aspect of democracy, related to the functioning of representation, is political equality. According to Dahl (On democracy, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998), democracies should be both responsive and treat its citizens as political equals. This latter element may be taken to mean that democracies should be—more or less—equally responsive to their citizens. However, studies show that, while there is evidence that governments represent or respond to people generally, there is less support of this form of political equality. In this research agenda and overview of studies dealing with representational inequality, some citizens seem better represented than others, most notably women, ethnic minorities, and those with lower income. I aim to take a modest step toward some more conceptual clarity and outline in what ways this field of study could be strengthened and expanded.
Peters, Y. (2018), “Democratic representation and political inequality: How social differences translate into differential representation”, 16(3), French Politics
As a key subject within the field of political science, democratic representation has been studied widely. One aspect of democracy, related to the functioning of representation, is political equality. According to Dahl (On democracy, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998), democracies should be both responsive and treat its citizens as political equals. This latter element may be taken to mean that democracies should be—more or less—equally responsive to their citizens. However, studies show that, while there is evidence that governments represent or respond to people generally, there is less support of this form of political equality. In this research agenda and overview of studies dealing with representational inequality, some citizens seem better represented than others, most notably women, ethnic minorities, and those with lower income. I aim to take a modest step toward some more conceptual clarity and outline in what ways this field of study could be strengthened and expanded
Works in progress
Procedural Congruence and the Delegate-Trustee Dilemma
Sveinung Arnesen, Troy Saghaug Broderstad, Mikael Johannesson and Jonas Linde
There is a well-known tension between the role of representatives as either trustees or delegates. This tension is also present when representatives interpret advisory direct democratic procedures. Should the representatives follow the opinions of their voters, or should they follow their own convictions? Previous research has shown that the legitimacy of a majority-rule procedure, as perceived by the general population, is dependent on the turnout, the size of majority, and the favorability of the outcome.In this article, we investigate whether elected representatives assess referendum results differently from their voters. To study this form of elite-citizen procedural congruence, we compare a survey experiment sent to all elected representatives in Norway (N=4231) with a probability-based survey of the general population (N= 1568). Using an EU membership referendum as a case of majority-rule, our results demonstrate a high degree of elite-citizen congruence, with one exception: The representatives display stronger outcome favorability bias when they are faced with an unfavorable referendum outcome. These findings have important implications for our understanding of when and how decision-making procedures are implemented and followed.
What do representatives represent? Gender Bias in the Assessment of Public Opinion
Andrea Fumarola & Yvette Peters
Democratic governments are generally fairly responsive towards their citizens. At the same time, studies demonstrated that they are not always equally responsive to all citizens: some people are better represented than others. One element in explaining this inequality is representatives’ accurate information about what citizens want. Whether using their own background or citizens’ participation as a source to learn about people’s preferences, representatives’ views may be biased exactly because of who they are or who the participants are. Regardless, the outcome would be that representatives might reflect some citizens’ opinions better than others. Here we examine whether representatives’ knowledge about their party voters’ preferences is correct and unbiased. Using data from the first round of the Panel of Elected Representatives in Norway and matching opinion data from the Norwegian citizen panel, we examine whether legislators’ assessments are correct and whether it reflects different groups in society equally. We find that representatives are quite accurate in assessing their voters’ preferences, overall. Moreover, we find that legislators reflect preferences of men better than that of women. Further, representatives’ own preference strongly predicts their accurateness: the more negative they are about an issue, the more likely they are to underestimate support for it.
Responsive to Whom? Representative-Voter Congruence on Views of Responsiveness
Andrea Fumarola
Political parties are the most important actors in the accumulation or articulation of interests in the representational process and have a key function as a democratic linkage, while parliament is the main institution in which representation takes place and where debates about (conflicting) interests happen. For this reason, analyzing the correspondence between citizens’ and elite’s opinion – i.e. their congruence – becomes dramatically relevant for the study of political representation. Agreement between political parties and citizens, or citizens and parliament, has, however, increasingly been analyzed only recently, even if their importance in the representational process is of utmost importance. Using data from the Panel of Elected Representatives and the Norwegian Citizens Panel, the present paper focuses on representatives’ views of responsiveness and how these attitudes relate to those of their voters. Much of the existing research on congruence has been descriptive, comparing elites with voters. Its goal is twofold. On the one hand, changing the perspective traditionally adopted in the literature on democratic representation, it aims to focus on elected representatives’ perceptions of government responsiveness. On the other hand, it aims to investigate the level of congruence between voters and elites on their views about government responsiveness considered in its double essence, i.e. mandate or policy responsiveness.
Gender Quotas with Twin Goals: Why new arguments and application areas may affect views positively
Ragnhild Muriaas and Yvette Peters
What change opinions about gender quotas? While decisions made by a body that is more gender balanced are seen as more legitimate, gender quotas as a means to reach gender balance is contested. Increased positive attention to how the society may benefit from gender quotas and the diffusion of gender quotas into new institutional domains, like business and religious boards, have however a potential to change opinions. We study Norway — a country with pronounced variation in support for gender quotas along an economic cleavage — and find through a survey experiment of citizens and elected representatives that the opinion of some sub-groups are affected when they hear that gender quotas should apply to religious boards or that boards may lose insights without such interventions in the recruitment process. We interpret these findings to mean that support for gender quotas may increase also in context where both citizens and elected representatives tend to have fixed views on a contested issue like gender quotas if the intervention is framed as one of two twin goals where one of those goals go beyond women’s rights.
Digital Inequality and Democratic Representation: Voters and Representatives in the Age of Internet
Trajche Panov
Digital Inequality and Democratic Representation: Voters and Representatives in the Age of Internet analyses how digital inequality affects democratic representation. It develops and critically discusses novel theoretical perspectives on the role of the Internet in political processes. I argue that that the internet has an impact on the legitimacy of the decision-making processes, and its effects are felt among both voters and elected representatives. For the first time, this book does not focus uniquely on voters and political candidates, but provides also a novel empirical analysis of digital inequalities among elected representatives and of the effects of the Internet on political accountability. This book argues that that the Internet does not help in decreasing the already existing inequalities in societies. All individuals with better socio-economic status and personal skills, no matter whether they are voters or representatives, are more likely to derive benefits from the Internet than individuals and social groups with lower skills. Thus, the internet can contribute to holding political representatives accountable only to a certain extent. By means of an innovative methodological approach and original data collection that combines survey experiments, my study demonstrates that digital inequalities are deeply imbedded in pre-existing social stratifications and that the online political participation of both voters and elected representatives reflects these inequalities. The internet generates the perception of (or “The internet causes”) a decrease in political accountability, although it provides more powerful and pervasive communication channels.
Congruence on representational practice? Matching citizens’ and representatives’ expectations of how representation should look
Yvette Peters and Rudy B. Andeweg
Research on political representation has developed greatly over the past decades. We now know more about the extent to which representatives hold similar preferences as citizens, how responsive policies are to public opinion, and that some groups in society tend to be sometimes better represented than other. One thing that we know less about, however, is to what extent citizens and representatives actually hold similar preferences on how that very object of study—political representation—should work. An emphasis on representational and decision-making procedures will help us understand what representative structures and practices will contribute to increased political legitimacy. As many citizens display a growing distrust to politics, a distrust in current representational institutions, and also express preferences for alternative decision-making structures (e.g. direct democracy, as well as a disregard of minorities), it is especially crucial to learn more about how citizens and representatives believe that the representative model of democracy should be working. Using the Norwegian Citizen Panel and Panel of Elected Representatives, we asked citizens and elected representatives questions about their ideas on the function of elections and the working of representation. We examine to what extent representatives hold similar opinions as citizens, and explore what determines these views.
The project The Politics of Inequality. How Representative Democracy (Mal-) Functions in Europe, is funded by the Trond Mohn Stiftelse and University of Bergen.
Yvette Peters 