Are the Politically Active Better Represented?

Political participation is often considered an important way for people to engage in an attempt to influence politics. Whether participation actually translates into more implementation of policies preferred by participators remains an open question, however. 

In her Lecture, Jennifer Oser contributes to this fundamental question with new answers by pairing cross-national survey-based data on people's political behavior and policy preferences on multiple policy issues with originally coded country-level data on subsequent policy implementation. Using data from more than 270,000 respondents in 40 countries covered in surveys from 1996 to 2016, Jennifer Oser's and her co-authors' results show that voters are not better represented than non-voters, but that people who are active in multiple types of non-electoral political activity are better represented than those who are inactive. They tested key alternative explanations that identify different potential causal pathways, namely socio-economic status, and pro-democratic attitudes. Jennifer Oser shows that while the link between non-electoral participation and opinion-policy congruence is sometimes diminished when accounting for these alternate causal pathways, the cross-national positive association between non-electoral participation and opinion-policy congruence remains robust and sizable.

Jennifer Oser is associate professor in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. Her research agenda focuses on the relationships between public opinion, political participation, and representation and she is Principal Investigator Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project "Participation and Representation in the Digital Age".

The event is part of the lecture series Civil Society and Political Conflict, organized by the Center for Civil Society Research.


The event will be recorded. You can find our information on data protection for photo and film recordings here.

The venue is wheelchair accessible. Please let Friederike Theilen-Kosch (friederike.theilen-kosch [at] wzb.eu) know if you need special assistance.