The Right-wing Bias in Politicians’ Collective Public Opinion Perceptions

AbstractThe chapter looks at politicians’ estimations of public opinion in the aggregate and finds that, as a group, Belgian politicians do not really hold accurate perceptions. Collectively, they make relatively big mistakes, with misjudgments of popular support mounting up to twenty percentage points for certain policy proposals. Most importantly, the data reveal a clear right-wing, or conservative, bias in politicians’ perceptions. Politicians consider citizens systematically as being more supportive for right-wing policies and less supportive for left-wing policies than they actually are. This applies to both their assessments of general public opinion and to their assessment of their own party electorate’s opinion. Building on Chapter 3 which showed that these perceptions strongly affect politicians’ political actions, the chapter speculates about the consequences of inaccurate and biased perceptions for actual policymaking.