2. Do politicians misperceive public opinion? If so, why?

Political scientists commonly measure voters’ ideologies and policy preferences with ideal points. This convention stretches back to the late 1940s, when spatial models of voting became popular for understanding voter and legislator behavior (Black, Reference Black1948; Downs, Reference Downs1957). Consistent with this tradition, in virtually every study of how politicians perceive public opinion, respondents are asked to summarize the preferences of individual voters with point estimates.Footnote ² In particular, politicians provide a single quantity in response to questions such as “What percentage of constituents support policy X?” or “Where does the average constituent stand on issue Y?”

Findings based on these point-estimate questions have painted a gloomy picture of elites’ perceptual accuracy. The first study to note the possibility of systematic bias in politicians’ perceptions of constituents was Erikson et al. (Reference Erikson, Luttbeg and Holloway1975). Subsequent large-scale surveys with legislators and legislative staffers have confirmed that politicians misperceive their constituents’ preferences frequently, in some cases making substantively large errors (Broockman and Skovron, Reference Broockman and Skovron2018; Pereira, Reference Pereira2021; Jasko et al., Reference Jasko, LaFree, Piazza and Becker2022; Walgrave et al., Reference Walgrave, Soontjens and Sevenans2022; Pilet et al., Reference Pilet, Sheffer, Helfer, Varone, Vliegenthart and Walgrave2024). Even more worryingly, these errors tend to have a directional bias: Across multiple countries, political systems, and policy issues, politicians tend to perceive public opinion as more conservative than it is (Dekker and Ester, Reference Dekker and Ester1989; Belchior, Reference Belchior2014; Broockman and Skovron, Reference Broockman and Skovron2018; Pilet et al., Reference Pilet, Sheffer, Helfer, Varone, Vliegenthart and Walgrave2024).

Scholars have tried to explain these perceptual errors in different ways. Some have suggested “supply-side” explanations—e.g., that conservative constituents may be more likely to contact politicians (Broockman and Skovron, Reference Broockman and Skovron2018). However, others have not found support for these mechanisms (Pilet et al., Reference Pilet, Sheffer, Helfer, Varone, Vliegenthart and Walgrave2024). Indeed, the remarkable persistence of conservative over-estimation across diverse institutional settings precludes any straightforward “supply-side” explanations. Another class of explanations suggests that politicians may tend to project their views onto constituents (Sevenans et al., Reference Sevenans, Walgrave, Jansen, Soontjens, Bailer, Brack, Breunig, Helfer, Loewen, Pilet, Sheffer, Varone and Vliegenthart2023; Lucas et al., Reference Lucas, Sheffer and Loewen2025). In particular, conservatives appear to exaggerate the commonness of their views (Stern et al., Reference Stern, West, Jost and Rule2014), which aligns with findings that conservative over-estimation is especially pronounced among right-wing politicians (Norris and Lovenduski, Reference Norris and Lovenduski2004; Broockman and Skovron, Reference Broockman and Skovron2018; Pilet et al., Reference Pilet, Sheffer, Helfer, Varone, Vliegenthart and Walgrave2024).

These explanations of politicians’ perceptual errors notwithstanding, the phenomenon itself seems incongruent with common wisdom about politicians’ incentives and policy representation. After all, the re-election prospects of elected officials supposedly depend on their ability to discern what constituents want (Downs, Reference Downs1957; Fenno, Reference Fenno1977; Mayhew, Reference Mayhew2005). Thus, they should be strongly motivated to develop “at least tolerably accurate” perceptions of public opinion (Miller and Stokes, Reference Miller and Stokes1963, 50). Some research also finds that democracies largely enact policies that conform to public opinion (e.g., Soroka and Wlezien, Reference Soroka and Wlezien2012; Caughey and Warshaw, Reference Caughey and Warshaw2022). How can this be true, if politicians misperceive their constituents’ preferences so frequently?

Another explanation for conservative over-estimation is that politicians are fairly accurate assessors of public opinion, but scholars have measured their perceptions in ways that hide this knowledge. First, while most politicians who complete research surveys appear to answer questions sincerely and carefully, the amount of effort that politicians devote to answering point-estimate questions in a survey is almost certainly lower than the effort that they devote to discerning public opinion in their working lives as representatives. Indeed, in the real world, politicians commit substantial time and effort to learning about public opinion (Walgrave et al., Reference Walgrave, Soontjens and Sevenans2022; Durovic and Schnatterer, Reference Durovic and Schnatterer2025) and applying this information when performing representative tasks (Butler and Nickerson, Reference Butler and Nickerson2011). As such, survey-elicited point estimates may under-represent the accuracy of politicians’ perceptions of public opinion, simply because point-estimate questions fail to cognitively engage politicians to the extent that their daily work does (a cognitive effort problem).

Second, the standard approach of using point-estimate questions to gauge public-opinion perceptions sits uneasily with findings from qualitative interviews with politicians. These interviews suggest that politicians find it unnatural to think about public opinion in terms of the point estimates queried in surveys (e.g., Walgrave et al., Reference Walgrave, Soontjens and Sevenans2022). In particular, politicians seemingly struggle to summarize the preferences of different groups with a single point estimate and prefer to think about their constituencies as consisting of different groups with distinct preferences (Fenno, Reference Fenno1977; Walgrave et al., Reference Walgrave, Soontjens and Sevenans2022). Indeed, this perspective may be more practical for politicians, given that different constituents are affected by different issues (Bishin, Reference Bishin2009; Hill, Reference Hill2022; Fastenrath and Marx, Reference Fastenrath and Marx2024) and that politicians must gain support from a variety of groups and citizens.

One recent study confirms that point-estimate questions can distort perceptions of public opinion (Dias et al., Reference Dias, Lelkes and Pearl2025). When placing the “average” Democrat and Republican on the same left-right policy scale, (non-elite) Americans seemed to perceive a gulf between the parties’ views. Yet, when the same respondents were asked to draw the distribution of each party’s preferences, their perceptions of polarization were far more modest and, critically, accurate. Similarly, asking politicians to draw the distribution of their constituents’ preferences may result in a more accurate picture of their perceptions. Such a measurement approach would allow politicians to report their perceptions in a way that better accommodates the differentiated nature of those perceptions. To be clear, politicians are unlikely to think about public opinion explicitly in terms of distributions per se. Yet, given their differentiated views of public opinion, politicians may be able to accurately report the distribution of their constituents’ preferences, even if they fail to summarize these perceptions with a single point estimate (a question-format problem).

3. Data and methods

To examine our research questions, we turn to data from municipal politicians in Canada. Canadian municipal politicians offer a valuable perspective on elite perceptions in that these politicians are directly elected and have wide-ranging policy responsibilities, including policing and public safety, land-use planning and housing, parks and recreation, transportation, and utilities. In addition, Canadian municipal politicians appear to perform similarly to other politicians on perceptual accuracy tasks (McAndrews et al., Reference McAndrews, Lucas, Merkley, Rubenson and Loewen2021; Lucas, Reference Lucas2024).

For our perceptual task, we chose to focus on left-right ideology as opposed to particular policy preferences. This is for three reasons. First, it allows for meaningful between-case comparisons: Few policy issues are relevant to many municipalities, so focusing on ideology allows us to ensure comparability in measurements. Second, many issues likely escape the attention of citizens entirely. In these situations, politicians may rely on abstract perceptions of ideology to impute public opinion about an issue. Indeed, recent research in Canada and other countries has found that left-right ideology plays an important role in municipal policy preferences (Tausanovitch and Warshaw, Reference Tausanovitch and Warshaw2014; Lucas, Reference Lucas2024) and municipal policy-making and representation (de Benedictis-Kessner and Warshaw, Reference de Benedictis-Kessner and Warshaw2016; Warshaw, Reference Warshaw2019; Lucas and Armstrong, Reference Lucas and Armstrong2021). Third, politicians’ perceptions of their constituents’ ideologies exhibit similar biases to their perceptions of citizens’ policy preferences (Belchior, Reference Belchior2014; Kübler, Reference Kübler2024). On page eight of our Supplementary Material, we show that over-estimating the conservatism of constituents’ ideologies is closely related to over-estimating the conservatism of constituents’ specific policy preferences.

3.2. Experimenting with the perceived-distribution task

To examine the effects of our “perceived-distribution task,” we embedded a pre-registered experiment in the 2024 CMB survey, which was fielded between January 8 and February 28, 2024.Footnote ⁴ A total of 788 politicians completed our study, for a response rate of about 21 percent. In the experiment, we randomized the order in which politicians answered three questions:Footnote ⁵

1. (1) Politicians indicated their own position on the left-right ideological spectrum, using the same question as used by the CMB survey since 2020 (ideological self-placement).

2. (2) Politicians indicated their average constituent’s position on the left-right ideological spectrum, using the same question as used by the CMB survey since 2020 (point-estimate question).

3. (3) Politicians drew the distribution of their constituents’ positions on the left-right ideological spectrum (perceived-distribution task).

To measure politicians’ perceptions of the distribution of ideology in their municipalities, we use an adapted version of a previously validated task (Dias et al., Reference Dias, Lelkes and Pearl2025). We provide a screenshot of our perceived-distribution task in Figure 1. In this task, politicians place twenty tokens on the left-right ideological spectrum, where each token represents five percent of residents in the respondent’s municipality. Details on how to implement the perceived-distribution task are provided on page 13 of our Supplementary Material.

Figure 1. A filled-out example of the “perceived-distribution” task used in this study.

To measure perceptual errors with respect to politicians’ point estimates, we subtract the municipality’s MRP estimate from the politician’s point estimate. Similarly, to measure perceptual errors with respect to the perceived-distribution task, we calculate the mean of the distribution drawn by each politician. Then, we subtract the municipality’s MRP estimate from this distribution mean.Footnote ⁶

5. Conclusion

Our results reveal that the apparent accuracy of politicians’ perceptions of their constituents’ preferences depends in part on how these perceptions are elicited. Politicians in our study—and especially right-leaning politicians—consistently made large errors when asked to provide point estimates of their constituency’s ideological position. In particular, these politicians regularly over-estimate their constituents’ conservatism, in keeping with findings from other countries and levels of government (Norris and Lovenduski, Reference Norris and Lovenduski2004; Broockman and Skovron, Reference Broockman and Skovron2018; Walgrave et al., Reference Walgrave, Soontjens and Sevenans2022; Pilet et al., Reference Pilet, Sheffer, Helfer, Varone, Vliegenthart and Walgrave2024). However, when these same politicians were asked to draw the distribution of their constituents’ ideologies, the error in their estimates was reduced by more than half.

Several mechanisms could explain the improved accuracy we observe when politicians complete the perceived-distribution task. We have proposed two such mechanisms. First, the perceived-distribution task prompts politicians to think about public opinion more carefully, as they would in their day-to-day work (addressing what we call the cognitive effort problem). Second, the task allows politicians to report their perceptions in a way that accommodates their differentiated perceptions of public opinion (addressing what we call the question-format problem). We leveraged the random order in which politicians completed a typical point-estimate question and our perceived-distribution task to show that both mechanisms likely contribute to politicians’ improved accuracy.

That said, we note that our design is not ideally placed to provide an exhaustive analysis of potential mechanisms. For one, we do not compare politicians’ performance on the perceived-distribution task to that of non-elite citizens. As such, it is unclear whether the “errors” corrected by the task are specific to politicians or common to all humans. It could be that politicians develop domain-specific expertise for discerning public opinion (e.g., Walgrave et al., Reference Walgrave, Jansen, Sevenans, Soontjens, Pilet, Brack, Varone, Helfer, Vliegenthart, van der Meer, Breunig, Bailer, Sheffer and Loewen2023). If politicians possess such expertise—but this expertise is better accessed by the perceived-distribution task, as we argue—then the task’s effect on accuracy should be stronger for politicians than for citizens. By contrast, if the task increases accuracy by encouraging cognitive effort in a more simplistic manner, we might expect politicians and citizens to benefit equally from the perceived-distribution task. Furthermore, other mental processes, beyond the ones we discuss, might also explain why the perceived–distribution task improves accuracy. For example, point estimates may be especially vulnerable to the representativeness heuristic (for examples with politicians, see Stolwijk and Vis, Reference Stolwijk and Vis2021) or prototypical thinking (Dias et al., Reference Dias, Lelkes and Pearl2025). That is, point estimates may overrepresent quickly recalled exemplars that are unrepresentative of citizens in general. Disentangling these mechanisms using designs that allow researchers to decompose domain-general and domain-specific sources of perceptual error is, in our view, a critical priority for future research.

Whatever the mechanism behind our experimental effects, however, our results help to resolve a long-standing puzzle in elite behavior and policy representation research: Why does past research find that politicians misperceive their constituents’ preferences, given that politicians are incentivized to know what their constituents want (Downs, Reference Downs1957; Fenno, Reference Fenno1977; Mayhew, Reference Mayhew2005) and that policy generally follows public opinion (Soroka and Wlezien, Reference Soroka and Wlezien2012; Caughey and Warshaw, Reference Caughey and Warshaw2022)? At least part of the answer appears to be that scholars have measured politicians’ perceptions in ways that hide the true extent of their knowledge.

Nevertheless, even when politicians complete the perceived-distribution task, perceptual errors persist. In particular, centrist and right-leaning politicians continue to over-estimate their constituents’ conservatism. While the magnitude of these over-estimates is much smaller, their persistence suggests that conservative bias is not only a function of how researchers have measured politicians’ perceptions. We have provided evidence that a tendency for politicians to project their views onto constituents (Sevenans et al., Reference Sevenans, Walgrave, Jansen, Soontjens, Bailer, Brack, Breunig, Helfer, Loewen, Pilet, Sheffer, Varone and Vliegenthart2023; Lucas, Reference Lucas2024) helps to explain the large and persistent asymmetry between left-leaning and right-leaning politicians in the magnitude of conservative over-estimation. That said, we have also revealed a marked tendency toward conservative over-estimation among all politicians, across the ideological spectrum.

Importantly, the normative significance of our results depends on how politicians actually think about public opinion in their daily work. Like all studies of politicians’ perceptions, our study necessarily involves a degree of artificiality. However, on the basis of existing work, we have argued that the perceived-distribution task provides a more realistic sense of politicians’ perceptual accuracy than typical point-estimate questions. First, it encourages politicians to think more carefully about public opinion, as they would on the job (Walgrave et al., Reference Walgrave, Soontjens and Sevenans2022; Durovic and Schnatterer, Reference Durovic and Schnatterer2025). Second, it lets politicians report their perceptions of their constituents’ preferences in a way that accommodates the differentiated nature of those perceptions (Fenno, Reference Fenno1977; Walgrave et al., Reference Walgrave, Soontjens and Sevenans2022). As such, our results suggest that politicians’ perceptions of their constituents’ preferences are more accurate than previously believed. However, if what politicians do in reality is more akin to the fast-paced inferences captured by the point-estimate task, the implications of our results are more worrisome.

We see considerable value in future applications of our perceived-distribution task to politicians’ perceptions of citizens’ policy preferences. Where constituents stand on specific policy issues, rather than how they place themselves ideologically, is even more directly related to politicians’ ability to deliver policy responsiveness. Moreover, there is extensive research documenting that politicians misperceive the public’s preferences across a host of policy domains. Testing whether the perceived-distribution task similarly improves politicians’ perceptual accuracy about concrete policy preferences would be an important extension and validation of our findings.

We also see potential in considering the types of constituencies that politicians think about and respond to. It may be that the perceived-distribution task would improve the perceptual accuracy of some politicians more than others, depending on what their constituencies look like. In our study, local politicians were asked to estimate the ideology of all residents in their municipality. It might be the case that politicians at other levels of government, who serve larger and often more heterogeneous constituencies, may benefit even more from thinking about the distribution of public opinion. In systems where politicians are motivated to respond to well-defined party electorates that are ideologically cohesive (as is often the case in proportional representation systems), distributions may not provide much added value over point estimates. Comparatively exploring how different measurement approaches reduce perceptual errors has the potential to uncover differences in the underlying sources of seemingly universal biases, such as conservative over-estimation, that may be otherwise masked.

Finally, we see value in future studies comparing the full distribution of constituents’ preferences to politicians’ perceived distributions. It may be that politicians perceive the average ideology of their constituents with reasonable accuracy, but otherwise misperceive the distribution of perspectives among their constituents. For instance, politicians may over- or under-estimate the spread or diversity of their constituents’ preferences (Dias et al., Reference Dias, Lelkes and Pearl2025). Such misperceptions are potentially important: If politicians under-estimate how many of their constituents are ideologically extreme, they may neglect issues that motivate the most politically active constituents (van der Meer et al., Reference van der Meer, van Deth and Scheepers2009).