Lacking Incentives, Not Information. Why Politicians tend to be Less Responsive to Lower-Income Citizens

The principle that democracies give all citizens an equal voice is challenged by scholarly work showing that policies tend to be biased in favor of the more wealthy citizenry. One reason for such unequal representation lies in representatives being less responsive to the preferences of lower compared to higher-income citizens in their policy actions. Drawing on surveys with local elected representatives in Belgium and Sweden, this study zooms in on two potential drivers of unequal responsiveness. We look at the possibility that politicians have less incentives to be responsive to the less affluent, and less accurate information to do so in the first place. Concretely, we question politicians about the anticipation of accountability from lower- versus higher-income citizens (incentives) and make them estimate the policy positions of lower- and higher-income citizens (information). Moreover, we explore whether descriptive representation factors into these two possible drivers of unequal responsiveness by leveraging variation in politicians’ backgrounds. First, we find that representatives anticipate significantly less electoral accountability from lower-income than from higher-income citizens. Moreover, politicians with a lower-class background hold less unequal accountability beliefs, hinting at the importance of more equal descriptive representation in mitigating inequality in responsiveness. Second, unequal responsiveness does not seem to be a matter of representatives having less accurate information about the opinions of lower-income citizens; politicians’ estimations of different income groups’ policy preferences are equally inaccurate.