H2020Индивидуална стипендия2017–2019

UNREP · Who Should Have a Say? Preferences for Unequal Representation

„Хоризонт 2020“ — Действия „Мария Склодовска-Кюри“

Период: 2017-09-01 → 2019-08-31
Финансиране от ЕС: 165 599 €
Участници: 2
Схема: MSCA-IF-EF-ST

Линиите свързват координатора с партньорите.

Накратко на български

Предпочитанията на гражданите се изследват чрез въпроса дали политиците трябва да слушат всички еднакво или да дават приоритет на малцинствата, които се влияят най-силно от дадено решение. Това помага да се разбере как личните убеждения и предразсъдъците формират отношението към обществените консултации.

Този кратък обзор е генериран от изкуствен интелект

Кратко обяснение, генерирано от езиков модел по текста на CORDIS. Оригиналът е по-долу.

Резултати накратко

Who Should Have a Say? Preferences for Unequal Representation

The goal of this project was to examine the factors determining when citizens prefer that politicians ignore or pay special attention to minority groups that would be disproportionately affected by a policy decision. The starting point here was that elected officials aiming to represent their constituents are faced with a difficult tension: balancing an egalitarian approach to democratic influence - whereby everyone's opinion is treated equally - with a proportional one based on policy impact - whereby those who would be most affected by a given policy change are granted the most influence over it. The project's main focus was therefore on attitudes toward, as well as reactions to, public consultations. In particular, it set out to examine how public opinion surrounding these consultation measures were shaped by various factors. Baseline expectations highlighted the potential influence of individual-level factors such as one’s stance on a given policy, one’s partisanship, one’s dislike for an affected group, and one’s levels of internal and external political efficacy. Overall, results suggest that one’s stance on a given policy, one’s dislike for an affected group (i.e. racial resentment), and one’s levels of internal and external political efficacy all appear to play a role in shaping the attitudes under study. Related results also suggested that a politician’s membership in the consulted group also affects citizen reactions.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз

Цел на проекта

Equal representation is at the core of representative democracy, but are citizens actually in favour of it? There are good reasons to think that citizens may take a variety of stances toward unequal representation (i.e. differential group influence over policy) particularly when it comes to groups that elicit strong emotional reactions (e.g. racialised minorities). Citizens may think that policy-affected groups deserve extra input (due to affectedness), less input (due to bias), or the same amount of input as everyone else. However, it is impossible to say anything meaningful about these attitudes since we know almost nothing about them. This lack of knowledge is a serious shortcoming with real-world implications: these preferences shape politics and, by extension, the functioning of representative democracies. My proposed study is thus relevant not only for recent debates in political science over both the extent and origins of unequal representation, but also for contemporary politics – with its surging populist claims that certain groups have excessive influence over policy.This project looks beyond an abstract commitment to equal democratic representation, investigating how citizens feel about the influence of specific groups on concrete issues. It does so by employing large-scale, representative panel surveys and innovative survey experiments in the US and the Netherlands, whose key similarities and differences allow us to maximise the insights derived from a two-country comparison. Through methodological triangulation, this project will lead to novel insights, revealing the nature and determinants of preferences around unequal representation. The findings from this research will produce important results both for those seeking to better understand the connections between inequality and democracy and for anyone interested in the representation of marginalised groups and the growing appeal of populism.

Оригинален текст от CORDIS (на английски).

Участници

UNIVERSITEIT UTRECHT · UtrechtКоординаторНидерландия
STICHTING VU · AmsterdamНидерландия