Listening to the people: politicians’ investment in monitoring public opinion and their beliefs about accountability

ABSTRACT

Politicians’ understanding of public opinion constitutes a crucial factor in the representational relationship between them and the public. Therefore, politicians staying abreast of what citizens want and why they want it matters for democratic representation. In this study, we examine how intensely politicians monitor public opinion and why there is variation between politicians. Relying on survey evidence collected among Belgian MPs and U.S. local legislators, we show that politicians who more strongly feel the weight of voter scrutiny – who believe that voters are aware of what they do and will hold them accountable for it at the ballot box – interact more frequently with ordinary citizens, discuss public opinion more often with their fellow colleagues, and spend more time collecting public opinion information. The effect is potent, even if we control for politicians’ electoral vulnerability, their ambition and their role conception.

KEYWORDS:

• Representation
• public opinion
• anticipation of electoral accountability

Acknowledgements

The authors want to thank Julie Sevenans for her help with the data collection and funding.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We surveyed both the Flemish members of the national Parliament (the Chamber) and of the regional Flemish Parliament. Electoral circumscriptions (six) and rules for both elections are the same and both parliaments have important, albeit different, political competences.

2 Belgium is a federal country with Flanders and Wallonia as the two main regions. Both regions have their own language (Dutch is spoken in Flanders, French in Wallonia), have their own parties, their own public opinion and their own media system (see Deschouwer, 2009). Hence, Flanders could be considered a political system in its own right.

3 The survey was conducted in the framework of the POLPOP project in Flanders, led by Stefaan Walgrave from the University of Antwerp (Flanders, Belgium), with funding from the national science foundation.The following people were part of the Flemish POLPOP team: Stefaan Walgrave, Julie Sevenans, Pauline Ketelaars, Karolin Soontjens, Kirsten Van Camp and Arno Jansen.

4 Important to note is that politicians were not in campaign mode at the time of the surveys and interviews, national elections only took place one year later in May 2019.

5 We recoded outliers (>1.5*interquartile range) to the max outlier value of 27 h a week. Also, we ran the analyses again classifying outliers more strictly, not recoding outliers and classifying politicians’ answers into seven categories, and results did not change.

6 Note that we also tested whether objective electoral (un)safety (based on the amount of seats politicians’ party won in their district in the previous elections, in combination with their position on the ballot list) affects public opinion monitoring, but it does not.

7 Civicpulse is a non-profit organization that administers surveys to US local government officials on a regular basis. For more information see: https://www.civicpulse.org/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (FWO) [grant numbers 11G8819N and G012517N]. Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek.

Notes on contributors

Karolin Soontjens

Karolin Soontjens is a PhD candidate at the University of Antwerp financed by the FWO (grant number 11G8819N). She is a member of the research group Media, Movements & Politics (M2P) in the Department of Political Science.

Stefaan Walgrave

Stefaan Walgrave is a full professor at the University of Antwerp. He is a member of the research group Media, Movements & Politics (M2P) in the Department of Political Science.