Politicians' Reading of Public Opinion and its Biases

Examining a central assumption widely accepted as being crucial in making democracy work - that politicians form a more or less accurate image of public opinion and take that perception into account when representing citizens - Politicians' Reading of Public Opinion and its Biases presents a paradox of representation. On the one hand, politicians invest enormously in reading public opinion. They are committed to finding out what the people want and public opinion is a key consideration in many of their undertakings. Yet, on the other hand, politicians' perceptions of public opinion are surprisingly inaccurate. Politicians are hardly better at estimating public opinion than ordinary citizens are. Their perceptions are distorted by social projection, in the sense that politicians' own opinion affects their estimations, and on top of that, there seems to be a systematic right-wing bias in these perceptions. The findings imply that one of the main paths to responsive policy-making is flawed. Even though politicians do the best they can to learn about people's preferences, skewed perceptions put them on the wrong track. From a democratic perspective, the central findings of the book are quite sobering. The high hopes that many authors had with regard to politicians' ability to adequately 'consult' or 'sense' public opinion appear to be vain. The book puts forward a plausible driver of the slippage between the public and politics. Politicians are less responsive to people's preferences than they could be, not because they do not want to be responsive but because they base themselves on erroneous public opinion perceptions.

Stefaan Walgrave is a professor of political science at the University of Antwerp (UA). He received his PhD in sociology from KULeuven in 1995 and has been at the UA ever since. The chair of UA's Media, Movements and Politics (M²P) research group, his research deals with representation, media & politics, protest participation, social movements, public opinion, and elections. He published widely on each of these topics. Currently, his predominant focus is on individual elected politicians, and on how they read, evaluate, negotiate and relate to public opinion. He is leading a large, international project (ERC) on how politicians evaluate public opinion.
Karolin Soontjens is a doctoral candidate at the University of Antwerp. She is a member of the research group Media, Movements & Politics (M²P) in the Department of Political Science. Her PhD focuses on political representation. Other research interests include media & politics and public opinion.
Julie Sevenans is a postdoctoral researcher and teacher in research group Media, Movements & Politics (M²P) at the University of Antwerp. She obtained her PhD from the University of Antwerp in 2017. Her research deals with (inequality in) political representation, public opinion, and the relationship between politicians and the media.

- Preface - Introduction - 1: Reading and perceiving public opinion as a mechanism of representation - Part One: Politicians' Reading of Public Opinion - 2: Ambivalent attitudes towards public opinion - 3: The impact of public opinion on political action - 4: The daily preoccupation with reading public opinion - 5: Confidence and doubts about reading public opinion - Part Two: Inaccuracy and Bias in Politicians' Perceptions of Public Opinion - 6: Measuring accuracy and bias of public opinion perceptions - 7: The right-wing bias in politicians' collective public opinion perceptions - 8: Inaccuracy of politicians' individual public opinion perceptions and the difference between good and bad raters - 9: Projection and information as explanations for the perceptual bias - Conclusion: Lost in Representation