Research Professor after obtaining ERC Advanced Grant (POLEVPOP).

How politicians evaluate public opinion. In democracies, policies are expected to be responsive to public opinion—the policies decide upon should more or less reflect what the citizens prefer. Extant research showed that responsiveness is selective, though. It varies across issues, time and countries. Yet, how come policies vary in their responsiveness has not received a satisfying answer. During my ZAP-bof mandate I try to formulate and examine a novel answer to the puzzle why policy responsiveness varies. The core argument is that politicians evaluate public opinion and let their actions—in line with public opinion or going against it—depend on their appraisal of public opinion. When public opinion is evaluated negatively, it has no effect on what politicians do; that it is evaluated positively increases the chance that politicians act congruently. Politicians may, for example, consider citizens' opinion to be not very knowledgeable or selfish, or they may think that these opinions are not intensely held but are just superficial, or they may think just the opposite of course. Yet, politicians' appraisal of public opinion has been completely overlooked as a mechanism bringing about responsive representation. Considering it a core factor, I will exame three matters: (1) which criteria politicians use to appraise public opinion; (2) how, depending on the opinion content of the message, the channel through which the opinion is conveyed and the group from which it comes, concrete public opinion signals are evaluated; and, (3) which effects these evaluations have on politicians' political action. The central expectation is that public opinion is evaluated by politicians based on a consistent and common 'scoreboard'. For instance, opinion signals are rated based on their representativity and underlying public opinion is evaluated on its quality and its intensity. The project tackles these matters drawing on a comparative study in eight different countries (Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Israel, Portugal, Switzerland, and Sweden). In two consecutive rounds of data gathering, a large sample of politicians is surveyed and interviewed, and they are subjected to a series of survey-embedded experiments. To put politicians' behavior in perspective, their answers are compared to parallel citizen surveys in all countries.

Keywords:POLITICIANS, REPRESENTATION, INEQUALITY

Disciplines:Comparative politics, Belgian politics, Political psychology, Party politics