For representative democracy to work, politicians must "know" and "react to" public opinion, including by "constrain[ing] their behavior to be consistent with" it. However, "elected representatives are more ideologically extreme and maintain a systematically distorted understanding of constituents' policy preferences" and their perceptions of what people think are often biased "in the conservative direction."
The people think what I think: False consensus and unelected elite misperception of public opinion
Alexander C. Furnas, Timothy M. LaPira
First published: 30 January 2024 https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12833
Verification Materials: The data and materials required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures, and analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/3VFVS7.
"More radically, he [Jeffrey Winters] argues that the very idea of democracy challenging oligarchy is not only naive but the opposite of the truth. The lethal talent of the very rich has been an enduring capacity to engineer representative politics to their advantage." (Democracy’s terrible secret: According to the political scientist Jeffrey Winters, representative politics doesn’t restrain oligarchs—it enables them, Matthew d’Ancona, June 10, 2026)
No comments:
Post a Comment