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.
