Unequal representation in redistributive politics: Evidence from interviews with politicians and citizens

The paper contributes to debates about the unequal political representation of low-income voters. While much research concludes that lower-class citizens are less well politically represented than the rich or business interests, our knowledge about the underlying reasons is limited. As a contribution to filling this gap, we focus on a mechanism that might produce unequal representation: politicians’ perceptions of and assumptions about public support for redistributive policies. Most previous contributions have relied on the notion of ‘unequal responsiveness’, which builds on a fairly simple conception of representation. At least implicitly, preferences in different social categories are assumed to be exogenous inputs, which policymakers receive as a clear signal that they strategically respond to or ignore. In practice, representation involves, however, a great deal of ‘sense making’ among representatives. This includes interpreting the noisy signal coming from their constituency. Such interpretative work is done under conditions of intense uncertainty. What the public wants, how it can be convinced of a policy, and which strategy competitors will pursue are unknowns. Our core interest in this paper is in how such uncertainty influences the linkage between citizens and political elites in redistributive politics – and how it contributes to political inequality. To this end, we rely on an innovative two-stage research design addressing the subjectivities involved in the act of representation among political elites as well as citizens. In a first step, around 30 interviews with members of the German Bundestag provide in-depth accounts of how political elites perceive public support for one of the most redistributive policy approaches available to them: taxing the rich more heavily. They show that lower-class citizens are perceived as indifferent or even hostile towards tax increases. The frequently voiced assumption is that the public’s skepticism about redistributive policies is facilitated by strategic political communication of right parties and business lobbyists. In a second step, we verify politicians’ assumptions about public opinion in eight focus groups (four each with low- and high-skilled citizens). The conversations largely confirm politicians’ assumptions. Not only are even the poorest participants unconvinced of the idea to tax the rich; the stated reasons largely correspond to what politicians describe as ‘myths’ allegedly spread by business propaganda for decades. Other elite assumptions that could be confirmed were a) diverging support for redistribution in general and for concrete redistributive policies, b) a limited interest in and knowledge about policy details, and c) the corresponding tendency to interpret social inequality through personal experiences rather than abstract information. These results speak directly to the themes of the workshop. They show that reconciling representation of low-income voters with a viable electoral strategy can be difficult. When the policy demand of lower-class voters is vaguely articulated (or even influenced already by political competitors), representation cannot be limited to responsiveness; it has to include shaping constituencies’ perceived interests and preferences.