The Gendered Assessment of Public Opinion

Can representatives accurately assess policy preferences of citizens? Given that almost all parliamentary democracies channel the preferences of their citizens through elected representatives, male and female parliamentarians should be 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 translate into 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 the public's policy preferences. In particular, we investigate perceptual accuracy with regard to policy issues that are usually characterized as "soft" or "feminine". We expect that female parliamentarians are able to assess policy preferences of the public on these issues better. Since female representatives share gender-specific experiences with the female population, they should have a more accurate perception of the public's policy positions regarding women-specific issues compared to their male colleagues. We test these expectations using original data from surveys with political elites and a corresponding population surveys in Germany and Switzerland. Including representative’s estimates of their electorate's opinion with regard to six different policy areas, the results show that female MPs' perception of the public opinion on women's issues is generally not more accurate than that of their male colleagues. However, we can show that the perceptual accuracy of female representatives increases if their electoral vulnerability is high. Mediation analyses of the causal mechanism show that gendered differences in elite’s perceptions of public opinion are not driven by representatives’ personality traits.