Concerns that low turnout leads to a bias in political representations have existed for a long time. Although research has shown that low turnout has little influence on the distribution of votes and seats in most cases, we can also see that on some issues political preferences between voters and non-voters systematically differ. In this paper we test the hypothesis whether policy preference of elites rather represent preferences of voters compared to non-voters. Using data from European parliament elections, we can show that low turnout leads to a biased representation, on both a socio-economic and a cultural political dimension. Non-voters tend to be more in favor of redistribution and more against immigrants than both voters and political elites. This effect remains once we control for differences in the socio-economic background of voters and non-voters. This shows that elites care more about representing voters than the entire population.
