Politicians' Reading of Public Opinion and Its Biases

AbstractPoliticians care a lot about public opinion, they put great effort into getting to know what the people want. They almost constantly assess public opinion through a large variety of sources. And although most of them define themselves as trustees, in their actual day-to-day decision-making almost all politicians behave as delegates in the sense that they hardly ever deliberately cross public opinion but act in line with it (or act not at all). Notwithstanding their great focus on public opinion, politicians’ perceptions of what it is that the people want are remarkably inaccurate. They not only misjudge the share of people supporting specific policies, they also quite often position the majority on the wrong side of the debate. Their perceptions of public opinion are not only inaccurate, but most of the time biased as well. Politicians perceive the public to hold more right-wing positions than it actually does. Together, the inaccuracy and bias of politicians’ public opinion perceptions challenge the idea that elected representatives make representative democracy work by relying on their public opinion perceptions. In Flanders (in Belgium), the political system this book looks at, politicians do everything within their power to understand citizens’ preferences, but they do not always succeed in acting responsively because of their mistaken perceptions.