Politicians Citizens’ Theories of Democracy: A 13-Country Study

• In Event: Comparative Studies of Elite Political Behavior

Abstract

For decades, political scientists have developed and defended widely varying empirical theories of democracy. The debates that these theories have generated – identity versus policy voting, retrospective versus prospective voting, issue-centric versus leader-centric party evaluations, and so on – animate a great deal of contemporary work in empirical political science. While we know a lot about what political scientists think about these debates, we have effectively no knowledge of the theoretical perspectives held by the actors most central to the functioning of democratic institutions - politicians and citizens. Here, we argue and show that citizens and (especially) politicians have concrete theories of democracy; that their theoretical positions vary widely; that they have an observable influence on their behaviour and attitudes; and as a result, that political scientists should be concerned with studying these theoretical perspectives, a task that we tackle head-on in this paper.

To do so, we use results from an original 13-country survey of more than 31,000 citizens, along with parallel interviews with over 1,000 elected politicians, to provide a first-ever comparative overview of politicians’ and citizens’ theories of democracy on nine axes of theoretical debate, including fair vs. unfair blame attribution, single-issue versus multiple-issue voting, retrospection versus prospection, and many others. For each theoretical debate, we compare elected politicians and citizens, noting important differences in elite vs. mass theories of democracy as well as patterns of similarity and difference within and across countries. We then use an exploratory Latent Class Analysis to construct a typology of democratic theories among citizens and politicians. We note important areas of theoretical congruence between politicians and citizens, but we also describe several important dimensions of theoretical debate on which citizens and their representatives disagree about the character of democracy itself. This disagreement is particularly pronounced, we show, in assessments of citizens’ ability to evaluate politicians’ behaviour in office. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for contemporary democratic theory, and outline priorities for future research on elite and mass theories of politics.

Authors

• Jack Lucas, University of Calgary

• Lior Sheffer, Tel Aviv University

• Peter Loewen, University of Toronto