Democratic Representation and Trust: how Responsiveness Facilitates Responsibility

Peter Mair highlighted that representative democracy entails governments that are both responsive and responsible. He argued that political parties—those who generally form the government—find it increasingly difficult to balance these two tasks. With an increase in international commitments and economic interdependence, governments often argue that they have to act responsible and cannot always follow the wishes of its voters. To be sure, responsive and responsible decisions do not need to be at odds all the times; they can easily overlap. However, the moments where they do not overlap require governments to make a choice between what people want and what is the responsible thing to do. Especially this last concept is a difficult one to conceptualize and operationalize. Whereas responsiveness could be taken to mean the match between what people want and what they get in terms of policies and policy output, responsibility appears to invoke a more normative interpretation. However, based on the principles of democracy, as well as the notion of self-preservation of a nation, it is possible to extract a meaning of responsibility. We identify three dimensions: a) the extent that governments can maintain political equality (e.g. are different groups in society proportionally equally likely to get what they want), that b) governments can protect people from threats that may threaten their existence (e.g. war, economic crises, internal coups), and c) democratic procedural fairness and a lack of corruption or aims of personal gain. We aim to contribute to this debate by looking at the relationship between responsiveness and the leeway that governments have to take responsible and unpopular decisions. More specifically, we argue that when governments follow citizens’ preferences sufficiently, they build a ‘buffer’ of trust that allows them to also make unpopular decisions—decisions that are non-responsive but possibly responsible. This idea taps into the idea of a reservoir of goodwill, where governments can use this ‘goodwill’ to survive periods where things are not going well. Political support is an important popular indicator of how well a country performs democratically, and is often associated with some of the dimensions of responsibility as set out above. I.e. they tend to be less corrupt, and emphasize the importance of political inequality and the welfare of most of its citizens. Combining data from the ESS waves 1 to 7 and Eurostat, we test whether the level of responsiveness indeed leads to a higher level of political support for the government, giving these governments more discretion in making decisions—allowing them to be more responsible.