Party Dynamics in (Mis)perceptions of public opinion by subnational representatives

A small but growing literature has shown that elective representatives neither hold accurate nor unbiased views of public opinion. Yet, this literature has almost exclusively focused on national elected representatives only and not examined how dynamics of party politics affect these patterns. Given that local democracy is often praised for facilitating a stronger degree of interaction between representatives and their constituents, an optimistic view would suggest that subnational representatives are better able to estimate public opinion for their municipality or region. Relying on state-of-the-art methods in public opinion estimation, we scrutinize this question looking at both the accuracy and potential biases in estimates of public opinion by subnational elected representatives. Our study design allows us to compare perceptions of public opinion for subnational representatives to that of national representatives as well as to estimate whether subnational representatives vary in their ability to predict national and subnational public opinion. To do so we poll the general public towards a set of specific policy issues and run surveys of representatives at both the local, regional and national level in Denmark and the Netherlands asking them to estimate public opinion towards the same issues. We also explore which factors are associated potential inaccuracies and biases in the perceptions of public opinion by representatives paying particular attention to potential differences between politicians from populist versus non-populist parties. Our study has important implications for understanding not only the function of local democracy but also the party dynamics of political representation in general.