How Politicians Discount the Opinions of Lower-Educated Citizens

An important challenge facing political decision-making today is inequality in representation. Political scientists have shown that the preferences of certain groups—especially those who have higher incomes (Bartels, 2008; Gilens, 2012) or are better educated (Aaldering, 2017)—systematically preponderate in political decision-making. It is hard to remedy such inequalities when little is known about the factors that cause them in the first place. That is why a growing number of researchers try to gather empirical evidence on the mechanisms underlying unequal representation (Peters, 2018; Rosset, 2016). One important driver, they for instance show, is that there is inequality in political participation (Schlozman, Verba, & Brady, 2013). This causes politicians to misperceive what the public actually wants: they assume the opinions of the active citizens can be generalized to the full population (Broockman & Skovron, 2018). Moreover, it causes politicians to face a skewed electoral incentive, as the disadvantaged groups punish unresponsive politicians less at the ballot box (Griffin & Newman 2005). The consequence of such a reasoning is that inequalities in representation can be alleviated by activating disadvantaged groups to participate politically. The current paper aims to elucidate the mechanisms of unequal representation further, by focusing on an alternative, possible driver of representational inequality: that politicians discount the opinions of certain disadvantaged groups—and here specifically: the lower educated. We test the idea—also raised by Butler (2014)—that politicians have a hard-wired inclination to assume that the opinions of citizens who received lower (i.e. vocational) education are less thoughtful than the opinions of citizens who followed a higher (i.e. general) education. Importantly, if such a bias exists, making disadvantaged citizens participate more in politics is insufficient to alleviate inequalities in representation because their opinions are not taken seriously anyway. Rather, we should for instance try to raise awareness amongst politicians of their psychological reflexes to more easily discount certain opinions than others. Concretely, the paper presents evidence from a survey experiment with political elites about a pending policy proposal in Belgium: lowering the voting age at local elections to 16. In the survey, politicians were confronted with polling information stating that a majority of citizens do not support the policy proposal. Importantly, we manipulated the polling information as to refer to the opinions of lower- and higher-educated citizens (both 16 and 17-year-old pupils and their parents) respectively. The results show that politicians think the opinions of the lower-educated pupils are less thoughtful than the opinions of the higher-educated pupils. This is true for politicians who favor the proposal as well as for politicians who oppose it. Even if politicians say that both groups’ opinions should to the same extent be taken into account, their differential judgment of these opinions illustrates the psychological foundations that ultimately make politicians often disregard the preferences of the lower-educated.