The Voter-Elite Link at Different Levels of Governance

The (missing) link between voters and politicians has received increased attention over the last few years. Scholars have started investigating the accuracy with which politicians perceive public opinion as one explanatory mechanism for (missing) policy congruence. The central hypothesis is that if perception of the preferences of their electorate is distorted, politicians will also "fail" at their task of representing this same electorate. So far, scholars have mainly focused on using politicians' characteristics such as their own political leaning to explain systematic variation in perceptual accuracy. We build on this literature and add an institutional dimension: levels of governance. Specifically, we expect that politicians are better able to predict public opinion regarding issues that fall clearly within their level of governance than issues that do not. To test our hypothesis, we conducted a survey of MPs at the national (N=153) and cantonal (N=220) levels of government in Switzerland and paired this with data from a large survey of the electorate (N=4520). As a highly federalized country, Switzerland provides an ideal case for testing our hypothesis; the high level of federalization means that at both levels of governance, we can test consequential statements. We tested the exact same 18 statements on 9 policy issues with MPs and citizens. For each issue, we chose one statement on an aspect clearly situated at the national level and one at the cantonal level. Each respondent, MP or citizen, received nine statements for evaluation on different issues and for which we purposefully varied the levels of governance. This systematic approach allows us to identify whether MPs are systematically better at estimating public opinion at "their" level of governance.