The Gendered Assessment of Public Opinion

How accurately can representatives assess the policy preferences of female and male citizens? Given that almost all parliamentary democracies channel the preferences of their citizens through elected representatives, male and female parliamentarians should be equally able to correctly estimate the policy preferences of the entire electorate. Personal biases of representatives may lead to inaccurate perceptions about what citizens want and cause representational inequalities of certain social groups. We investigate the role of gender in this regard and analyze to what extent female and male representatives have accurate views about men’s and women’s policy preferences. Theoretically, we expect that female parliamentarians are better able to assess the policy preferences of women. Since female representatives share gender-specific experiences with the female population, they should have a more accurate view of women’s policy positions compared to their male colleagues. This effect should be stronger for policy issues that are usually characterized as “soft” or “feminine”. Empirically, we test these expectations using original data from surveys with political elites and symmetrical population surveys in Germany and Switzerland. Including representative’s estimates of their electorate’s opinion with regard to eight different policy areas, the results confirm our hypotheses. Mediation analyses of the causal mechanism show that gendered differences in elite’s perceptions of public opinion are not driven by representatives’ personality traits. We rather show that the perceptual accuracy of female representatives increases if their electoral vulnerability is high.