The Politics of Representation. the Role of Political Parties in Europe in an Age of Globalization and Liberalization

Political representation is a core feature of contemporary democracies, where one criterion is that people’s voices should be incorporated in the representation and creation of public policies. As a consequence, both political congruence and policy responsiveness have been studied extensively over the past decades. However, it has also been argued that interests of non-popular actors, such as e.g. International Organizations or private corporations, have gained importance in determining public policies. The central question of this paper is whether representation of popular interests and—in that sense politics—still play a role in policy-output. I aim to combine the notions of political congruence, i.e. the overlap in preferences of citizens and representatives, and policy responsiveness, i.e. the relation between citizens’ preferences and policy output, in a comparative study. I expect that in countries where congruence is higher, policy congruence is also higher, thus supporting the existence of a well-functioning system of representation. Furthermore, I aim to identify some possible explanations for why parties in some countries perform better in aggregating preferences, than in other countries—for example their ability to recruit members. In order to examine these relations and possible explanations, I use data from the ESS (2002-2014), as well as from Eurostat, and will analyze these data using a time-series cross-sectional approach.