How wealth and income inequalities translate into political inequality: Assessing the mechanisms that produce biased policy congruence in democracy.

The tension between inequality in income and wealth on the one hand and political equality on the other in democracy has received increasing attention in recent years. Numerous studies show that economic inequality undermines political equality, illustrated by the evidence that in advanced democracies political decisions tend to correspond to the preferences of affluent citizens (Bartels 2017). This finding holds true also in less likely cases such as Germany (Elsässer, Henze, Schäfer 2020), where legal regulations (e.g., party finance rules) limit the political influence of wealth and income relatively strictly. Besides blatant corruption or lobbying, various explanations for the biased policy congruence have been proposed (e.g., Bartels 2008; Gilens 2012; Gilens and Page 2016). Major hypothesized mechanisms are, first, that MPs are disproportionately responsive to affluent citizen (responsiveness); second, MPs are themselves rather affluent and therefore tend to make decisions that reflect the preferences of citizens of higher social strata (descriptive representation). However, it is not yet fully understood empirically if and under which conditions the different mechanisms become relevant. We contribute to this debate and investigate the role of wealth and income for responsiveness and descriptive representation. To that end, we present a novel analytical approach for studying the levels of wealth and income and their effects on MPs with survey research. Central to our approach is a set of survey experiments to analyze the different mechanisms that could yield selective responsiveness. Specifically, we develop various vignettes that expose MPs to demands of citizens with varying characteristics and assess MPs’ reactions. In addition to modifying the levels of wealth and income, we draw on existing experiments and vary, inter alia, whether a citizen is a voter or campaign contributor. We argue, our experimental approach combining multiple potential mechanisms tests robustly if and when MPs’ selective responsiveness to affluent citizens is a secondary effect of affluent citizens’ greater participation levels (Elsässer, Henze, Schäfer 2020) or their greater financial campaign contributions (Kalla and Brookmann 2016), or whether MPs genuinely react more responsively to affluent citizens. Moreover, we develop an array of indirect measurements of wealth and income which mitigates participation and response biases in surveys – in particular concerning MPs. We can, thus, assess more diligently to what degree MPs descriptively resemble the population economically. In our paper we also present first findings of an application of our analytical approach. We draw on new original large-n dataset on MPs (federal- and state-level) and citizens in Germany and assess the contextuality of how different mechanisms facilitate that wealth and income inequalities translate into political inequality.