As representative democracy is increasingly criticized, a new institution is becoming popular among academics and practitioners: deliberative citizens’ assemblies. To evaluate whether these ...assemblies can deliver their promise of re‐engaging the dissatisfied with representative politics, we explore who supports them and why. We build on a unique survey conducted with representative samples of 15 Western European countries and find, first, that the most supportive are those who are less educated and have a low sense of political competence and an anti‐elite sentiment. Thus, support does come from the dissatisfied. Second, we find that this support is for a part ‘outcome contingent’, in the sense that it changes with respondents’ expectations regarding the policy outcome from deliberative citizens’ assemblies. This second finding nuances the first one and suggests that while deliberative citizens’ assemblies convey some hope to re‐engage disengaged citizens, this is conditioned on the expectation of a favourable outcome.
Political Misinformation Jerit, Jennifer; Zhao, Yangzi
Annual review of political science,
05/2020, Volume:
23, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Misinformation occurs when people hold incorrect factual beliefs and do so confidently. The problem, first conceptualized by Kuklinski and colleagues in 2000, plagues political systems and is ...exceedingly difficult to correct. In this review, we assess the empirical literature on political misinformation in the United States and consider what scholars have learned since the publication of that early study. We conclude that research on this topic has developed unevenly. Over time, scholars have elaborated on the psychological origins of political misinformation, and this work has cumulated in a productive way. By contrast, although there is an extensive body of research on how to correct misinformation, this literature is less coherent in its recommendations. Finally, a nascent line of research asks whether people's reports of their factual beliefs are genuine or are instead a form of partisan cheerleading. Overall, scholarly research on political misinformation illustrates the many challenges inherent in representative democracy.
Today, several social movements in western democracies argue that traditional representative democracy has failed to adequately represent the will of the “people”, and instead support direct ...democracy as the only political system to restore the will of the majority. We analyze under what conditions the policy – a vector of decisions on every issue – implemented by the winner of a bipartisan electoral competition coincides with the policy that citizens would choose by means of direct democracy. We find necessary and sufficient conditions for this equivalence to hold, implying that, as long as at least one of them is not fulfilled, a divergence of outcomes between direct and representative democracy arises. The first condition requires that the outcome of majority voting issue-by-issue is the Condorcet winner relative to the voters’ preference profile over the set of policies. The second requires that either that outcome is the preferred policy for at least one of the candidates, or that candidates’ preferred policies differ on every single issue. We reinterpret some findings in the literature in the light of our model and present them as potential reasons why the equivalence between direct and representative democracy may fail.
•We find necessary and sufficient conditions for the coincidence of policies implemented under direct and representative democracy.•Loosely divided electorates and highly polarized politicians favor such a coincidence.•The bundling of issues by politicians does not jeopardize the coincidence.
How do citizens want to be represented by elected officials in an era of affective polarization? Contemporary narratives about American politics argue that people embrace elite expressions of ...negative partisanship, above and beyond representation on policy. Using three conjoint experimentsf I examine how individuals weigh the relative value of substantive representation on issues, constituency service, and partisan affect. The findings challenge the notion that Americans are primarily motivated by their affective, partisan identities and demonstrate the value of policy congruence and service responsiveness in terms of perceptions of political representation. The implication is that people evaluate elected officials in ways that we would expect them to in a healthy, functioning representative democracy, rather than one characterized by partisan animus. Even if polarization is driven by "affect, not ideology," citizens prioritize representational styles centered around the issues that matter to them.
We study the consequences of populism for economic performance and the quality of bureaucracy. When voters lose trust in representative democracy, populists strategically supply unconditional policy ...commitments that are easier to monitor for voters. When in power, populists try to implement their policy commitments regardless of financial constraints and expert assessment of the feasibility of their policies, worsening government economic performance and dismantling resistance from expert bureaucrats. With novel data on more than 8,000 Italian municipalities covering more than 20 years, we estimate the effect of electing a populist mayor with a close‐election regression discontinuity design. We find that the election of a populist mayor leads to smaller repayments of debts, a larger share of procurement contracts with cost overruns, higher turnover among top bureaucrats—driven by forced rather than voluntary departures—and a sharp decrease in the percentage of postgraduate bureaucrats.
This article opens a Special Issue on Democratic Stress. Against the background of recent debates on 'democratic crisis', we argue that the concept of 'democratic stress' provides a useful way to ...understand the diversity of pressures that representative democracy faces in the contemporary context, as well as a valuable 'organising perspective' for developing more nuanced analyses. We then map out the main contributions of the articles included in this special issue, and survey the way in which they further this agenda, conceptually and empirically.
Emergency Europe White, Jonathan
Political studies,
June 2015, Volume:
63, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
At the level of general principle, representative democracy is appealed to by the EU institutions and member states alike. Yet in today's Europe it risks being marginalised amidst the actions and ...rhetoric of emergency — a norm to be waived in a state of exception, leaving decisions of lasting consequence shielded from public debate. A German constitutional theorist once famously defined as sovereign the one who has the power to declare the state of exception, and linked this power closely to executive suspensions of the law. The European setting invites a different understanding of an emergency regime: one that is manifest in the contravention of norms which may or may not be legally codified, and which is collectively produced by multiple actors. The persistence of politics in the emergency register indicates precisely the weakness of political authority. The article goes on to examine how exceptional this exceptionalism is. Is Europe's emergency politics a recent phenomenon, or has it been one of the currents of European integration from the beginning?
Despite some prominent critics, deliberative democrats tend to be optimistic about the potential of deliberative mini‐publics. However, the problem with current practices is that mini‐publics are ...typically used by officials on an ad hoc basis and that their policy impacts remain vague. Mini‐publics seem especially hard to integrate into representative decision making. There are a number of reasons for this, especially prevailing ideas of representation and accountability as well as the contestatory character of representative politics. This article argues that deliberative mini‐publics should be regarded as one possible way of improving the epistemic quality of representative decision making and explores different institutional designs through which deliberative mini‐publics could be better integrated into representative institutions. The article considers arrangements which institutionalise the use of mini‐publics; involve representatives in deliberations; motivate public interactions between mini‐publics and representatives; and provide opportunities to ex post scrutiny or suspensive veto powers for mini‐publics. The article analyses prospects and problems of these measures, and considers their applicability in different contexts of representative politics.
Although an increasing volume of research has identified several negative sociopolitical attitudes as correlates of conspiracy theories, to date it remains unclear whether belief in conspiracy ...theories is necessarily in conflict with support for democratic governance. In this contribution, we integrate previous findings suggesting inconsistent relationships between belief in conspiracy theories and support for democratic governance. Study 1 (N = 300) shows that belief in conspiracy theories is associated with decreased support for representative democracy but increased support for direct democracy. Study 2 (N = 270) replicated these findings and revealed that these relationships were mediated by political cynicism and feelings of powerlessness. In Study 3 (N = 298), we experimentally show that a system with direct democracy (as compared with representative democracy) empowered participants and therefore decreased belief in conspiracy theories. Contrary to the common notion that conspiracy theories are associated with decreased support for democracy, these findings suggest that conspiracy beliefs are associated with a preference for direct over representative democracy.
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