Environmental Issue Congruence and Unequal Representation

Policymakers should reflect the policy preferences of citizens in a representative democracy (Pitkin, 1967). A potential democratic deficit – a gap between preferences of the people who vote and the representatives they vote for – can threaten the function of representative democracy. Much research in the field of political congruence has focused on ideology, typically measuring mass-elite distance through self-placement on the left-right scale. More recently, issue congruence has become an increasingly common approach. Compared to the general ideological congruence, issue congruence captures (mis)match between representatives and citizens on specific policy issues. A few scholars have connected issue congruence more with inequality, by dividing the mass into groups, and specifically turning the lens towards underrepresented groups. This paper follows that line of work by looking at issue congruence in sociodemographic groups divided by gender, age and educational attainment. Using survey data from the Norwegian Citizen Panel (NCP) and the Panel of Elected Representatives (PER) from 2018 and 2019, this paper studies environmental issue congruence between the public and elected representatives from local, regional, and national levels in Norway. The two panels provide a unique opportunity to measure congruence on specific policy issues with identical questions asked in both panels, instead of relying on interpreting and recoding vague and differing questions. The policy issues analysed in this paper concerns meat and dairy production, electric cars, and oil and gas extraction. I use Earth Mover’s Distance (EMD), a many-to-many measure of congruence that compares the distributions of the public’s and elite’s preferences. I find that representatives are less congruent with younger citizens than they are with older age groups. The young are underrepresented at all political levels, and I argue that the results indicate a connection between descriptive and substantive representation. Representatives are also less congruent with women – another descriptively underrepresented group. Differences between levels of education vary.