By Scott Burris
In recent posts, I have been pointing to research that suggests that government intervention for public health is actually rather popular as a general matter. Now comes a neat paper that takes on the question of whether politicians actually know what their constituents want. I read it as further evidence that our politics is being shaped by a lot of well-supported anti-government noise-making that has been allowed to flourish unchallenged.
The paper in brief: the authors surveyed candidates for state-level legislative office, and used a technique called multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP) to localize opinion poll data to legislative districts. They then compared what candidates think their constituencies believe on key issues (health care reform, gay marriage, welfare reform) with what the polls say their constituents believe. They find that both conservatives and liberals significantly overestimate the conservatism of the people who elect them:
“In districts where supporters of these policies outnumber opponents by 2 to 1, liberal politicians appear to typically believe these policies enjoy only bare majority support while conservative politicians typically outright reject the notion that these policies command widespread support.”
The paper is worth reading for its findings (and to allow you to personally assess its limitations – this has not yet even been peer reviewed.) A more detailed summary with some of the charts is on Dylan Matthew’s Washington Post blog.