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. We aim to contribute to this debate by looking at the relationship between responsiveness and the leeway that governments have to take responsible and possibly unpopular decisions. More specifically, we argue that when governments follow citizens’ preferences sufficiently, they build a ‘buffer’ of trust and support that allows them to also make unpopular decisions—decisions that are not necessarily 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. Using data from the 2012 ESS (wave 6), we test whether perceived responsiveness feeds into this reservoir of goodwill; and whether consequently, this reservoir increases perceived responsibility. We find support for this link between responsiveness and responsibility, suggesting that responsiveness and responsibility do not need to be trade-offs but can actually complement each other.