Elite Misperceptions: Examining Asymmetry in Partisan Political Participation

Do politicians truly represent the populations they serve? Recent research may provide an answer. David E. Broockman and Christopher Skovron’s recent paper asserts that there is a systemic incongruity between true public opinion and elected officials’ perceptions of public opinion. Using a survey that sampled over 3,500 state representatives across seven issue areas from 2012 to 2014, the authors compared politicians’ perceptions of the views of their constituents with the actual views of those constituents. The project found that politicians, in pursuing responsiveness to voters, react to asymmetric information environments and create a distinct one-sided bias in their policy decisions. Simply put, politicians across the spectrum believe the people they have been tasked with representing are markedly more conservative than those people actually are.

The authors argue that the cause of these asymmetric information environments is clear. In the modern political era, Republicans have become increasingly more likely to participate in the political process through partisan activities such as attending town halls or contacting representatives (especially Republican representatives). In earlier eras, members of each major party were equally likely to participate in partisan activities and, as such, there was less asymmetry in politicians’ misperceptions of public opinion. Between 2008 and 2016 however, Republican politicians were found to only vote in a manner reflective of the majority of their constituents about half of the time.

The research suggests that unrepresentative information environments are the basis of how politicians form their opinions about constituent views and the resulting policy choices they make. While both Republican and Democratic representatives were found to overestimate the degree to which their constituents adhere to Republican policies and political standpoints, Republicans were found to overestimate by more than 10 percent, and often more than 20 percent, on every single issue except for one[1]. The level of polling a representative took during the time period did not reflect more or fewer errors in perception of public opinion.

According to the researchers, asymmetry in partisan political participation warps information environments because of how responsive politicians are to those environments. If that is the case, then what role should government take in rectifying this incongruity? Is imperfect responsiveness an issue we wish to correct, or does the solution lie not within the responsiveness but in the creation of the right-skewed information environments, in which case the burden falls to the people? How do we, as a society, want to react to the notion that the democratic institutions we depend on are systematically misrepresenting the people they are supposed to serve? What does it say about those institutions that the bias favors a demographic group that is already overrepresented in dominant discourse and power structures? Like much research, these findings present more questions than answers. However, they do provide some insight into our country’s political workings. What policymakers and the public do about it remains to be seen.

[1] The only issue for which Democrats underestimated conservative support for a Republican issue was support for religious exemptions on birth control policy.

Article source: Broockman, David & Christopher Skovron, “Bias in Perceptions of Public Opinion among Political Elites,” American Political Science Review Vol. 112, Issue 3 (2018): 1-22.

Featured photo: cc/(ChrisBoswell, photo ID: 541836502, from iStock by Getty Images)