Recent survey research indicates low levels of satisfaction among citizens with the way representative democracy functions. The 2008 American National Election Survey shows that 60 percent of the Americans think public officials do not care what people think (ANES 2008). In Europe too, cross-national research showed that 55 percent of citizens believe politicians do not care what they think and supports the claim that politicians are only interested in their votes not in their opinions (ESS 2002). However, responsiveness is one of the core values of a democracy. In a representative democracy politicians are expected to act “in the interest of the represented in a manner responsive to them” (Pitkin 1967,209). Therefore, politicians need information on citizens’ preferences and demands. This information can be gathered through contacts with citizens or indirectly through the media or interest groups. Citizens can communicate their preferences to their representatives and pressure them to take these preferences into account through various forms of political participation. Political participation repertoires have expanded substantially in recent decades. While voter participation and party membership are in decline in most countries, non-institutionalized forms of participation are on the rise such as boycotts, internet activism, demonstrations (Stolle and Hooghe, forthcoming). Political systems are well-equipped with ways to integrate traditional institutionalized forms of participation, and to accommodate the input provided by these acts. However, there is far less experience with ways to include the input received by means of non-institutionalized forms of political participation. To date we do not know how politicians perceive and respond to these non-institutionalized forms of participation. One of the main challenges for politicians seems to be to determine how representative the input they received through these means, actually is. In this paper the ways in which members of parliament gather information and communicate with citizens is assessed. Using survey data from a recent large data gathering project among Members of Parliament of 14 European countries and Israel (2009-2010), we analyze which sources of information MPs use and the importance they attach to them (e.g. contact with individual citizens, contacts with interest groups, media coverage,..). MPs are asked to assess the effectiveness of 11 different forms of participation (including institutionalized and non-institutionalized forms). Since we have access to data from 15 different political systems, we can assess whether structural characteristics of the political system have an effect on the ranking of these various participation acts by members of Parliament. Some authors have also formulated the thesis that the present disenchantment with democracy, could be attributed to a lack of linkage between the participation acts preferred by citizens, and the acts that politicians are used to deal with. To investigate this claim, we will juxtapose the results among the members of parliament with the results of representative population surveys in their country (derived from the European Social Survey 2008). We investigate the ways in which citizens try to communicate with their representatives, and more specifically we investigate the claim that they judge the effectiveness of political participation acts in a different manner than member of Parliament do.
