Preferences for Multidimensional Political Representation

We study citizens’ preferences for multidimensional political representation. Specifically, we describe a new survey and associated analysis strategy to measure citizens’ attitudes along six dimensions of representation: the more conventional ones of (1) substantive and (2) descriptive representation, as well as the newly developed dimensions of (3) surrogation, (4) justification, (5) personalization, and (6) responsiveness (see Wolkenstein and Wratil, 2021). We develop and validate six question batteries for scaling citizens’ preferences on each dimension at the individual level that can be included in future surveys as well as a stated-preferences survey experiment to assess the relative importance of the six dimensions for citizens’ evaluations of representation. We field our instruments on diverse samples in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. Our results yield important insights into how citizens envision representative democracy, highlighting which representative practices are in need of reform.