Political Representation and Citizen Involvement. The Social Policy Responsiveness to Different Participants in Europe

Political participation is expected to facilitate political representation, implying that unequal participation can also results in unequal representation. This study aims to disentangle in what way participation can result in policy responsiveness through 1) different mechanisms (i.e. promissory and anticipatory representation), and 2) different causes (i.e. representatives' re-election aims and the communication of preferences to representatives). We analyze the relationship between preferences of different groups of participants ('activists'; 'voters'; 'alternative participants'; 'non-participants') and policy output using a time-series cross-sectional approach. We further consider the participants' individual characteristics to find whether there are systematic differences between the types of participants.