Mind the Gap! What Causes Long-Lasting Discrepancies between Political Elites and Citizens

The topic of elite-citizens divide is timely for two reasons: 1) the policy preferences between the elite and masses are diverging; and 2) party politics are increasingly influenced by non-socioeconomic cleavages. The primary purpose of this paper is to show that these discrepancies have been embedded in many old and new democracies for more than two decades (e.g. on defense and foreign policy issues in Korea and Japan; on cultural and religious issues in Colombia; on European integration issue in the UK and the Netherlands; or on interventionist foreign policy issues in the US) and to examine their causes. Based on a review analysis of both issue congruence and political cleavage literature (100 and 250 empirical works respectively), the project will examine individual, party, historical, and system-level causes behind mass-elite discrepancies on major political cleavages. Moreover, after reviewing the existing gap, I will suggest how the project can advance related debates conceptually, methodologically, and theoretically.