Several groups in democratic polities are legally excluded from voting. Are they thus also excluded from democratic representation? In this article, we focus on the political inclusion of underage youth and migrants. We theorize that proxy representation of their interests might occur through two mechanisms: mechanical or solidarity representation. Drawing on parallel citizen and politician surveys in 14 countries (N citizens = 27,465; N national politicians = 1,185), we find that both groups have some preferences that are not automatically matched by either the general electorate or politicians. While underage youth’s preferences are at least matched by young voters (aged 18 to 25 years), this is not the case for migrant non-voters. Second, we show that citizens and politicians largely consider youth, children, and future generations – but not migrants – to deserve political representation equal to that of adult citizens. In sum, our evidence suggests proxy representation is a weak alternative to enfranchisement, especially for the migrant population.

This paper investigates the conditions under which women are more likely to represent interest groups in parliamentary hearings, shifting attention from the content of advocacy to the identity of advocates. While existing research has focused on how interest groups gain access to legislative venues, it has largely overlooked who delivers these messages and how messenger characteristics shape political representation. Drawing on theories of gender representation, interest group advocacy, and source effects, we develop a framework that distinguishes between structural and strategic representation and examine whether gender is deployed as a symbolic and relational resource in legislative settings. Using an original dataset covering all interest group appearances in the Spanish Parliament from 1996 to 2023, and hierarchical logistic regression models with Bayesian inference, we analyze how organizational, institutional, and contextual factors shape gendered representation. The findings show that citizen groups are significantly more likely than economic organizations to be represented by women, and that female representation increases with the proportion of women MPs on parliamentary committees. Gendered patterns also vary across policy domains and hearing characteristics. Importantly, the results provide evidence consistent with strategic adaptation: interest groups appear more likely to select female representatives in gender-diverse institutional environments, suggesting that gender functions as a form of strategic signaling rather than solely reflecting internal organizational structures. These findings contribute to research on interest groups and political representation by highlighting how identity operates as a political resource, with implications that extend beyond parliamentary lobbying to broader debates on descriptive and substantive representation.

Election pledges are fundamental for representative democracy, linking parties’ campaigns before elections with their behavior afterwards. Yet little is known about voters’ awareness of these pledges before elections and how this affects post-election awareness of pledge fulfillment. Triangulating between a rich set of panel and pooled cross-sectional survey data surrounding the 2019 Danish national election (N = 10,322), we show that voters who were able to recognize and recall pledges before elections were more likely to be aware of their fulfillment status after the election. Furthermore, pre-election awareness mostly benefited people with less political interest, enabling these relatively disinterested voters to nevertheless hold parties accountable. These findings have important implications for our understanding of voters’ ability to make informed choices when they delegate power to parties at elections and hold them accountable afterwards.

When most of the world’s parliaments were created, women could not vote or be elected. Correspondingly, parliaments’ rules and infrastructure as well expectations of parliamentarians’ (MPs) performance were designed around masculine standards, including the assumption that MPs had no caretaking responsibilities. Scholars seeking explanations for women’s underrepresentation argue that parliaments remain unwelcoming to those with caretaking roles. As long as women continue to bear disproportionate household obligations, increasing women’s presence in elected office requires parliaments to adopt reforms to accommodate parents. We surveyed members of Germany’s national and state parliaments about their attitudes towards parenthood and politics and support for various parenthood accommodations. We find that gender rather than being a parent shapes how politicians perceive the challenge of reconciling politics and parenthood. But shared experiences among women do not automatically produce similar attitudes about policies to make parliaments family friendly. Party ideology and gender both predict support for parliamentary reforms.

Free and open public debate is a cornerstone of democratic representation, yet many politicians refrain from participating in policy debates. This study examines how political violence contributes to such silencing and whether it disproportionately affects historically marginalized groups. Using a unique Swedish politician survey (five waves, N = 43,000), we analyze whether violence reduces marginalized politicians’ participation in debates and whether it disproportionately silences debates challenging hegemonic male interests. We find that women and immigrant-background politicians are significantly more likely than their counterparts to report withdrawing from public debates because of violence and to avoid a broader range of topics. Women are particularly likely to refrain from debates on gender equality, while immigrant-background politicians are not more likely to avoid immigration debates. These chilling effects suggest that violence can narrow the range of voices present in policy debates, potentially diminishing marginalized groups’ ability to represent constituents and reinforcing hegemonic men’s political dominance.

Many affluent democracies have pledged to achieve ‘net zero’ greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century. Achieving these targets would denote important national contributions to the international goal of keeping global warming ‘well below’ 2°C as agreed in the 2015 Paris agreement. Yet pursuing the necessary long-term decarbonisation policies influencing individuals’ everyday lives will require a considerable and enduring level of political leadership. But what enables or constrains politicians to perform such leadership? To date, little is known about the factors influencing politicians’ willingness to advocate for decarbonisation measures in the short-term for the long-term gain of climate change mitigation. This study draws on rare data of consumers’ carbon footprints, parliamentary speechmaking, and qualitative elite interviews in a mixed-methods research design to study how the intensity of constituents’ consumption-based carbon emissions influences the decarbonisation-focused behaviour of members of parliament (MPs) in the UK. Our quantitative findings reveal that MPs pay considerably less attention to decarbonisation issues when they represent carbon-intense constituencies. Moreover, this effect is particularly pronounced for Conservative MPs and amplified in marginal seats. The qualitative interview evidence helps to contextualise these quantitative findings, suggesting that MPs consider the decarbonisation of lifestyles a crucial political challenge and that their electoral considerations and party-political contexts play an important role in how they handle this challenge. Overall, our study draws a sobering picture of politicians’ willingness to sacrifice short-term electoral gains for the long-term prospect of net zero, especially for those MPs representing constituencies that could make high-impact contributions to nationwide emission cuts.

Political representation is challenged by social acceleration, the rise of populism, and electoral volatility. Politicians’ need for prioritizing time and energy is acute and consequential for democracy. Voters’ preferences constitute one democratically relevant standard for guiding such priorities. However, current research mainly focuses on voters’ preferences for representatives’ personality traits or policy outcomes, which are hard for an individual politician to control. This study provides a conceptual framework for analyzing politicians’ task priority by separating functional legislative tasks from relational representative tasks, and employs this framework in surveys among Danish, German, UK, and US voters. Analyses of open-ended answers, time allocations, and conjoint experiments show that voters assign higher importance to functional tasks compared to relational tasks. The framework offers a new approach to studying political representation in practice, and the results provide guidance for how politicians should prioritize scarce resources for political representation in a high-speed, volatile political context.

Research on representation consistently shows that high‐income voters see more of their preferred policies implemented than less affluent citizens. However, the mechanisms behind this unequal policy representation remain unclear. This paper examines how voter behaviour, particularly the alignment between vote choices and policy outcomes, contributes to this disparity. Using a large dataset that spans close to 300,000 respondents across 32 European countries and 197 election periods, we analyse public policy preferences, vote choices and policy implementation. We find that high‐income voters have higher levels of policy congruence, are more likely to vote, vote more for parties whose positions match their own and are more likely to see their preferred parties in government. Nevertheless, these factors still do not explain the observed inequality in opinion–policy congruence. Hence, unequal representation cannot be attributed to electoral mechanisms. This result has important implications for our understanding of (unequal) policy representation and electoral accountability.

Individual legislators can be important agents of political representation. However, this is contingent upon their responsiveness to constituency requests. To study this topic, an increasing number of studies use field experiments in which the researcher sends a standardized email to legislators on behalf of a constituent. In this paper, we report the results of an original field experiment of this genre with the members of the German Bundestag. Supplementing previous research, we explore whether constituency requests in which voters mention a personal vote intention (rather than a partisan vote intention) increase legislators’ responsiveness, and how this treatment relates to electoral system's incentives. We find that legislators treated with a personal vote intention were more likely to respond (67 per cent) and respond faster than those treated with a partisan vote intention (59 per cent). However, we also show that the treatment effect is moderated by electoral system incentives: it is larger for nominally‐elected legislators than for those elected via a party list. Our results suggest that electoral system's incentives matter for legislators’ responsiveness only when constituents explicitly signals an intention to cast a personal vote.

Representation literature is rife with the assumption that politicians are responsive to voter preferences because their re‐election is contingent upon the approval of those voters, approval that can be won by furthering their desires or, similarly, that can be threatened by ignoring their wishes. Hence, scholars argue that the anticipation of electoral accountability by politicians constitutes a crucial guarantor of (policy) responsiveness; as long as politicians believe that voters are aware of what they do and will take it into account on election day, they are expected to work hard at keeping these voters satisfied. If, on the other hand, politicians were to think what they say and do is inconsequential for citizens’ voting behaviour, they may see leeway to ignore their preferences. In this study, we therefore examine whether politicians anticipate electoral accountability in the first place. In particular, we ask 782 Members of Parliament in Belgium, Germany, Canada and Switzerland in a face‐to‐face survey about the anticipation of voter control; whether they believe that voters are aware of their behaviour in parliament and their personal policy positions, are able to evaluate the outcomes of their political work, and, finally, whether this knowledge affects their vote choice. We find that a sizable number of MPs believe that voters are aware of what they do and say and take that into account at the ballot box. Still, this general image of rather strong anticipation of voter control hides considerable variation; politicians in party‐centred systems (in Belgium and some politicians in Germany that are elected on closed party lists), anticipate less voter control compared to politicians in more candidate‐centred systems (Canada and Switzerland). Within these countries, we find that populist politicians are more convinced that voters know about their political actions and take this knowledge into account in elections; it seems that politicians who take pride in being close to voters (and their preferences), also feel more monitored by these voters. Finally, we show that politicians’ views of voter control do not reflect the likelihood that they might be held to account; politicians whose behaviour is more visible and whose policy profile should therefore be better known to voters do not feel the weight of voter control more strongly.

A growing body of literature shows that the preferences of poorer groups in society are less well represented than the preferences of the rich. This paper scrutinises one possible explanation of inequality in representation: that politicians hold biased perceptions of what citizens want. We conducted surveys with citizens and politicians in four countries: Belgium, Switzerland, Canada and Germany. Citizens provided their preferences regarding concrete policy proposals, and then politicians estimated these preferences. Comparing politicians’ estimates with the actual preferences of different social groups, the paper shows that politicians’ perceptions are closer to the preferences of the richer than to those of poorer people for issues that matter most for economic inequality: socio‐economic issues. Further, we find that especially right‐wing politicians tend to think about the preferences of richer societal groups when estimating the preferences of their partisan electorates on socio‐economic matters.

A growing body of literature investigates whether legislators show biases in their constituency communication contingent upon constituent traits. However, we know little about whether and how findings of unequal responsiveness generalize across countries (beyond the United States) and across different traits. We address both issues using a pre‐registered comparative field experiment conducted in Germany, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, in which fictitious citizens (varied by ethnicity, social class and partisan affiliation) inquired about legislators’ policy priorities regarding the COVID‐19 pandemic. Our pooled analysis reveals that co‐partisanship and class both increase the responsiveness of legislators while we find no effect for ethnicity. The effect sizes we find are small, but comparable to earlier studies and also noteworthy in view of our hard test design. Our exploratory analyses further corroborate the lack of discrimination against ethnic minority constituents in showing no intersectionality effects, that is, interactions between ethnic‐minority and low‐class identities. This exploratory step also addresses the country specific differences that we find. We speculate about plausible underlying party system effects that we, however, cannot substantiate due to statistical limitations. This important issue requires further attention in future research.

Family‐friendly practices in parliaments are central to the recruitment and retention of diverse representatives. Yet, instituting such reforms raises questions about public reactions, something little tested in current work. A conjoint experiment in the United Kingdom tests if the public punish MPs for taking time off their elected roles for a baby. And, importantly, asks who pays the price? Against expectations, MPs who take parental leave are not punished by the public. Voters prefer MPs who are parents, even when they take leave. Crucially, this preference is contingent upon MP sex. Women MPs who take parental leave are consistently the preferred choice over their male counterparts. When the ‘costs’ of parenthood are emphasised, women MPs receive a parenthood benefit, while men MPs do not. The findings align with the recent positive bias for women in electoral choice experiments and lend further support to implementing family‐friendly policies in politics.

Systemic congruence between the whole legislature and the whole electorate (‘many‐to‐many’, or sociotropic congruence) should be the benchmark to evaluate a democratic system. Yet, most studies link shifts in democratic preferences to individual‐level representation (‘many‐to‐one’, or egocentric incongruence), since individual‐level representation failures should be more salient and visible for individual citizens. We argue that the sociotropic incongruence hypothesis has not been appropriately tested to date, because the measure does not vary at individual level in observational data. Using an experiment conducted in France, we manipulate various sociotropic (in)congruence scenarios at the individual level. In addition to the incongruence hypotheses, our original experiment tests whether offering expertise‐based justifications to incongruence attenuates the backlash against representatives. We find that, even when giving sociotropic incongruence a fair test, egocentric incongruence still consistently shapes democratic preferences, while the effect of sociotropic incongruence remains negligible. Furthermore, we find that narratives rooted in expertise claims do not attenuate the effect of representation failure on backlash against representative democracy: they exacerbate it.

In recent decades, the emergence and development of pan-European civil society organisations have been prominent, including those representing interests of marginalised groups and raising related social issues. Typically composed of national and European level umbrella organisations, some of these organisations have grown as important interlocutors between EU institutions and civil society, and derive legitimacy for their advocacy and lobbying activities by claiming broad representativeness. Through a comparative study of five principal EU-based civil society organisations, the present article analyses how these organisations, operating at multiple levels with their membership based on extensive geographical areas, acquire internal representation of members and beneficiaries.

This article systematically investigates interest group–party interactions in the Netherlands, Denmark and the United Kingdom based on cross‐national surveys with responses from 1,225 interest groups. The findings show that interest groups and parties still interact in the beginning of the twenty‐first century, but that the vast majority of their interaction involves a low degree of institutionalisation. Using fractional logit analysis, it is demonstrated that the strength of interest group–party linkage is primarily affected by systematic differences in state–society structures and organisational group characteristics. Moreover, differences are found in what conditions different types of interaction. Whereas historical legacies and partisan origin influence an interest group's structural party links, group resources make interactions of a less institutionalised, ad hoc nature more likely.

Previous research has shown that citizens tend to be more satisfied with the functioning of democracy when their ideological positions are more proximate to representatives'. This article argues that congruence in policy priorities between citizens and political elites should have a similar effect: citizens whose concerns are shared by elites should perceive them to be more attentive and responsive to public concerns and societal needs. Yet, the relationship might vary with differences in expectations towards democracy and representation. Specifically, it should be stronger in more democratic countries and older democracies. The hypotheses are empirically tested in a multilevel regression framework, where voter survey data from the 2009 European Election Study is linked with candidate survey data. The results indicate that citizens are indeed more satisfied with democracy if elites share their concerns, and the effect increases with democratic experience.

This article explores the conditions under which female members of parliament (MPs) are more likely than male MPs to participate in political debates relating to a range of issues. Building on descriptive representation theory and parliamentary behaviour studies, we examine how the effect of the number of women in parliament, and women's access to leadership positions, on MPs’ issue attention varies across policy areas and parliamentary venues. Looking at oral questions asked by male and female MPs in plenary sessions and parliamentary committees in Spain from 1982 to 2018, we found that numbers and leadership positions significantly affect female MPs’ attention to those parliamentary activities that aim to highlight the merits of government action and in venues that are less open to public scrutiny. Our results also illustrate that the presence of women in parliament and their access to leadership positions have a significant impact on female MPs’ attention to rights‐ and welfare‐related issues, but not issues traditionally linked to high‐profile political areas such as national security, macroeconomic policy, and government affairs. The presence of women in parliaments has increased globally, but inequalities in the gender distribution of issue attention persist, thereby reducing the capacity of female MPs to act on behalf of and stand up for women in political debates on most issues.