Does better knowledge of public opinion make a politician more successful? Investigating the 2019 Swiss general elections

Luzia Helfer1, Simon Hug2, Frédéric Varone3
 
Département de science politique et relations internationales,
Université de Genève
 
Paper prepared for presentation at the
EPSA General Conference Prague, June 2020

First version: January 2020, this version: May 17, 2020

Abstract

Two paths may lead to substantive representation. First, voters should elect those legislators who share their policy preferences. However, with incomplete information about legislators' preferences, a second path to representation becomes important as well: legislators' perceptions of voters' preferences. The more accurately they know their voters' preferences, the better they can represent them in the legislature. The present study brings the electoral and perceptual path to representation (Miller and Stokes, 1963) together and investigates whether correctly perceiving public opinion translates to electoral success. The 2019 Swiss general elections provide an ideal case for this study. In the summer of 2018, we have collected data from 496 national and regional Swiss legislators. As part of the survey, we have asked them to estimate the public opinion on 18 different policy proposals spanning issues from immigration to taxation. The 2019 elections then saw a large turnover in the national parliament: more than one third of the legislators stepped down or, in larger numbers, did not get re-elected. This provides a unique setting for us to test whether we find systematic differences between legislators who got re-elected and those who did not. In sum, pairing the accuracy of the estimations made by a legislator with how well this legislator did in the elections help us understand how the electoral and perceptual path of representation relate to each other. This will help us further understand the linkage between voters and their legislators and thus inform us about the fundamental workings of a representative democracy.


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