Do Politicians have Correct Perceptions of what the People Want?

Political representatives take their perception of what the citizens want into account when legislating, deliberating or taking political action otherwise. This is why elite perception of public preferences is one of the crucial tracks via which representation comes about. Yet, there is few research about where those perceptions come from and whether they are at all accurate. The little research there is suggests that elite perceptions are not accurate. Politicians tend to project their own opinion onto their constituency’s and overrate the congruence between what the people think and what they themselves think. Especially an explanatory framework accounting for differences across elites and across issues is missing. Extant work has showed that some elites do have more correct perceptions regarding some issues. But we don’t know why. The goal of this paper is to develop such an explanatory theory and test is based on elite data in three countries. We use the so-called media poll design in which elites in Belgium, Canada and Israel were asked about their assessment of the importance the general public attributes to a number of high profile media stories. At the same time, a representative sample of the populations in these three countries was asked about their own assessment of the priority of these media stories. This procedure allows us to directly measure the accuracy of elites’ public priority perceptions. Our theoretical framework suggests variables that gauge elites willingness to correctly assess public opinion and their capacity to do so.