Are Left-Wing Parties More Equally Responsive to the Public? A Comparative Analysis

Previous studies on the opinion-policy link have shown that politicians appear to be more responsive to the affluent than to the middle and working class. But the details and mechanisms explaining biased responsiveness remain unexplored. This paper explores two interrelated questions. First, have biases in responsiveness grown larger over time during the last few decades in Western Europe? And second, are right-wing parties more biased in their policy responsiveness to different income groups than left-wing parties? How well different parties substantively represent different economic groups is a source of enduring debate. While many scholars have posited that left parties make for better representatives of poor citizens than right parties do, others see no clear differences between party families, and some have even suggested the opposite pattern. Progress in this debate has been hampered by the scarcity of high-quality data, both when it comes to policy preferences among various income groups and when it comes to policy outcomes that can be matched to these preferences. In this paper, we improve on previous work by pooling and harmonizing unique data sets which cover the opinion-policy link in four European countries (Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway) and a substantial period of time (1980 to the present). The data includes targeted measures of public preferences towards hundreds of potential changes in socioeconomic policy within each country, connected to actual policy change on the same issues. A central hypothesis of the paper is that policy is more responsive to the demands of low-income citizens when left parties are stronger. At the same time, we expect that differences between party families have become smaller – and perhaps have disappeared – from the mid 1990’s onwards as a result of neoliberal convergence and potential pressures of globalization. Our results have broad relevance to the study of parties in representative democracies and illuminate a major chain in the link between economic and political inequality.