The party road to representation: Unequal responsiveness in party platforms |
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Authors: | WOUTER SCHAKEL BRIAN BURGOON |
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Affiliation: | 1. Departments of Sociology and Political Science, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands;2. Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands |
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Abstract: | This paper explores a major road to substantive representation in democracies, by clarifying whether demands of rich and poor citizens are taken up in the electoral platforms of political parties. Doing so constitutes a substantial broadening and deepening of our understanding of substantive representation – broadening the countries, issue-areas and years that form the empirical basis for judging whether democracies manifest unequal representation; and deepening the process of representation by clarifying a key pathway connecting societal demands to policy outcomes. The paper hypothesises that party systems in general will respond more strongly to wealthy than to poor segments of a polity. It also hypothesises that left parties will more faithfully represent poorer and less significantly represent richer citizens than do right parties. We find substantial support for these expectations in a new dataset that combines multi-country, multi-issue-area, multi-wave survey data with data on party platforms for 39 democracies. |
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Keywords: | representation inequality political parties public opinion |
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