Pathways to Substantive Representation: Evidence from Canadian Local Politicians

In recent years, new data and statistical techniques have enabled political scientists to reinvigorate research on two central elements of substantive representation: politicians' congruence with and knowledge of citizens' opinions. In this paper, we extend this research to local politicians and investigate the relationship between congruence and knowledge as pathways to substantive representation. We find that the two are strongly related: politicians who perform well on congruence also tend to have accurate perceptions of their constituents' opinions. Moreover, individual and contextual correlates of success on each of the two pathways, such as the representative's ideology, are very similar. We conclude with a discussion of the three main implications of our findings: congruence and perceptual accuracy as components of a single pathway to substantive representation; the need to better understand variation in congruence and perceptual accuracy across policy issues and issue types; and the quality of substantive representation at the local level in contemporary democracies.