The proposed paper wants to investigate the degree of discrepancy between German MPs and their population in terms of their attitudes towards representative democracy. Following the principal-agent-approach, representation is at its core about the delegation of power from the population (principals) to the representative elites (agents). Since the principals are dependent on the knowledge and experience of the agents, their basic strategy is to select trustful agents and to control them. In contrary, the agents want to enlarge their autonomy to make themselves more independent from the evaluation by their principals. This basic constellation of representative democracy causes that both the representatives and the represented demand to enlarge their own autonomy by restricting the autonomy of their counterpart.
Since the polity, i.e. the institutional structure, and the procedures of politics are important determinants for the degree of mutual autonomy and control, representative elites and the population are likely to differ in their evaluations about polity and politics. The paper accordingly shows empirical evidence for Germany that representative elites tend to favor professional political party elites who exert political leadership, while in contrary the population demands less political professionalism, less party influence and much more responsiveness of their representatives. This elite-population gap is not due to the composition of the representative elites, who differ from the population in terms of age, gender and education, but emerges out of the principal-agent-relation inherent in representative democracy.
For the population some, but not all of the mentioned evaluations and attitudes increase general dissatisfaction with democracy, even if other factors like education, economic performance or relative deprivation are controlled. When analyzing this variety of impact one general pattern occurs: especially those attitudes cause dissatisfaction with democracy, on which we find majorities close to consensus among the representative elites but a heterogeneous population. Thus, if the representative elites agree completely on pursuing politics in a certain way, dissenting attitudes are not represented and dissenting political procedures are not conducted at the level of representative elites. This lack of representation increases dissatisfaction among those citizens who share these dissenting attitudes or demand these dissenting procedures. This implies that elite-behavior at the macro-level influences the evaluations of the political system by the citizens at the micro-level.
The empirical basis of the analysis is provided by the Jena Parliamentarian Survey conducted in 2010, which comprises standardized interviews with 1222 German MPs at federal and single state level and a population survey conducted in 2009/10 comprising 2000 citizens.
