Politicians' Evaluation of Public Opinion.

When taking policy decisions, elected politicians balance their own ideological views against public opinion. As a result, responsiveness is selective: politicians' course of action sometimes follows and sometimes contradicts popular preferences. It is not yet well understood how politicians make this trade-off. This project examines a novel and understudied explanation at the micro level: how politicians evaluate public opinion signals. The core idea is that some public opinion signals are appraised more positively by politicians than others; and that this appraisal affects whether public opinion weighs on their actions. The objectives are (1) to lay bare the criteria that politicians use to evaluate public opinion; (2) to study how characteristics of a public opinion signal (sender, channel and content) affect its evaluation; (3) to understand how these evaluations affect political actions; and (4) to explore the interplay between politicians' own opinions and their evaluations of public opinion. To study these questions, the project draws on surveys, survey-experiments and interviews with politicians in Belgium. In two rounds of data collection, we will scrutinize what role evaluations of public opinion play in the coming about of political representation. The findings have the potential to inform us on important debates such as why certain disadvantaged groups (e.g. the poor) are represented worse than other groups.

Keywords:POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, POLITICAL BEHAVIOUR, POLITICAL ELITES

Disciplines:Public opinion, Political representation, executive and legislative politics