Multidimensional Representation: Enabling An Alternative Research Agenda on the Citizen-Politician Relationship

Project Information

MULTIREP

Grant agreement ID: 101076033

DOI

10.3030/101076033

EC signature date 28 March 2023

Start date 1 September 2023

End date 31 August 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 498 727,00

EU contribution

€ 1 498 727,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAT WIEN
Austria

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MULTIREP (Multidimensional Representation: Enabling An Alternative Research Agenda on the Citizen-Politician Relationship)

Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2026-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

When studying to what extent citizens are represented by politicians, political scientists usually focus on two aspects: 1) whether politicians advance the policy preferences and political views of citizens, and 2) whether politicians resemble the citizens they aim to represent in terms of descriptive characteristics (e.g. have the same gender, race or social background as them). However, recent theoretical research in political science has highlighted additional aspects of representation (e.g. whether citizens identify with politicians they have not voted for, how politicians relate to their party) and argued that citizens’ own views of how they want to be represented should be the starting point for studying representation. Following this call, the MULTIREP project aims to make the study of political representation more aligned with how citizens think about and what they expect from representation. First, it uses in-depth interviews with citizens (one-to-one and in groups) as well as surveys with special open-ended questions and experimental elements to determine how people think about representation and which aspects of representation are important to them. Second, for the aspects of representation most important to citizens, MULTIREP develops novel tools to measure citizens' views on these aspects in surveys and capture politicians' behavior towards these aspects in their speeches (e.g. when making a speech in parliament). Third, the project develops standards for what would qualify as "good representation" on these aspects and how we can assess the quality of representation practically in data on politicians' behavior. It is expected that MULTIREP will thereby enable researchers to study representation in new ways for which political scientists currently lack the relevant "toolkit". This also promises to provide new answers as to why many citizens are disenchanted with representation today and lose trust in democratic politics.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The MULTIREP project has conducted the planned in-depth interviews and surveys with citizens to find out how they think about political representation. 223 participans were interviewed one-to-one or in groups and about 10,000 were surveyed in five different countries (Denmark, France, Hungary, the Netherlands, the U.S.) during the year 2024. This data tells us what political representation means to citizens, how they think about different aspects of representation, which aspects are important to them, what experiences citizens make with representation, and what criteria they use when evaluating representatives. The clearest finding from this material so far is that citizens think and care a lot about whether politicians have the same policy peferences as them. At the same time, several aspects of representation that are prominent in the political science literature, such as whether politicians resemble citizens in descriptive terms (e.g. have the same gender, race) or whether politicians care about winning elections and pander to the public, are of little importance in the average citizen's thinking about representation.

MULTIREP also has completed a collection of speeches that politicians gave in the national legislature in nine different countries (Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, UK, the U.S.). In many cases, this data covers all speeches given by members of parliament from the mid 1990s to 2020 and later. It will provide the basis for building new tools to measure how politicians speak regarding different aspects of representation in the legislature.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

One of our first working papers analyzes our in-depth interviews with citizens, focusing on the question of what makes a good representative from the citizens' perspective. It shows that some aspects of representation that many researchers focus on (e.g. politicians caring about electoral sanctions, politicians resembling citizens in descriptive characteristics) play little role in how citizens think about representation. Participants rarely mention them when they think about what would make a good representative. These results are also supported by further findings from other project data, where these aspects also play little role in the views of citizens regarding representation. These findings, at least, question whether researchers should devote a lot of attention to these aspects of representation and whether the current direction of research on representation is most appropriate. The MULTIREP team is in the process of assessing what these results mean for our theories of what citizens want from representation as well as planning additional research to further test and validate these findings.