Do Politicians Outside the United States Also Think Voters are More Conservative than they Really Are? A Comparative Study of the Conservative Bias in Elite Public Opinion Perception

In an influential recent study, Broockman and Skovron (2018) documented a large and consistent conservative bias in U.S. politicians' perceptions of public opinion. Both Republican and Democratic elected representatives in the U.S. show the same tendency of overestimating the share of citizens holding conservative views on salient issues such as immigration, abortion or gun control. Their findings mark an important contribution to - and revival of - a longstanding research agenda focused on politicians’ perceptual accuracy (Miller & Stokes 1963, Hedlund & Friesema 1972, Erikson et al. 1975, Uslaner & Weber 1979, Converse & Pierce 1986, Esaiasson & Holmberg 1996, Belchior 2014). Here, we examine whether this conservative bias is unique to the American context or is found in other political systems. We explore this question in Belgium, Canada, Germany and Switzerland - four countries that differ substantially from the US (and from each other) in their government systems and electoral rules, posing a hard test of the hypothesis that the conservative bias is a universal phenomenon. Closely following and expanding on the original Broockman and Skovron design, and using an original in-person survey with 866 incumbent politicians, we find a large and statistically significant conservative bias among elected officials in all of the countries we study. We also find that the central explanation for the conservative bias put forward in the American case - that conservative citizens are more politically active and that politicians get more opinion signals from conservative than from liberal citizens - fails to explain the patterns we observe. Our results highlight the conservative perceptual bias of politicians as a widespread regularity. They suggest that further evaluating its prevalence across additional representation systems is a pressing research agenda, as is research focused on understanding its causes and its links to policy outcomes, and more broadly to findings on skewed representation and responsiveness patterns that comport with this bias.