Paper presentation by Alejandro Tirado in the framework of the Political Behaviour Colloquium.
(Co-authored with Noam Lupu, Vanderbilt University)
Major theories of democratic representation posit that elected officials ought to reflect the preferences of their constituents and act accordingly. But a growing body of research finds that modern democracies often fail to achieve this ideal.
In particular, studies have found that the preferences of affluent citizens tend to be better represented than those of the less affluent. On the one hand, legislators' positions seem to reflect more closely the preferences of affluent citizens. And, on the other hand, they also seem to pursue legislative actions that better reflect the preferences of the affluent. Yet, most of these studies have examined relatively wealthy, long-established democracies with very stable party systems.
In this paper, we leverage a unique set of publicly available mass survey data from a relatively younger democracy with a less stable party system, Spain. We study whether national legislators in Spain seem to be more responsive to the preferences of relatively affluent citizens. We use 122 publicly available, national surveys collected between 1976 and 2016, and examine the preferences of Spaniards at different levels of socioeconomic status on every policy proposal or issue that the surveys probed. We find consistent evidence that affluent Spaniards' preferences disproportionately influence policy outcomes.
In our empirical findings, we highlight that policies related with social issues and foreign affairs, especially those about the EU, have been the topics that generated greater levels of policy disagreement among Spaniards from different socioeconomic groups. The results show that these policies were disproportionately more likely to be approved if more affluent Spaniards endorsed it. As in wealthier and more established democracies, Spain's political system seems to be more responsive to the preferences of the affluent.