Canadians want politicians who reflect their views. Is that what they get?

Right now, in provincial election campaigns across Canada, voters are trying to work out which political parties and local candidates might be their best representatives.

In British Columbia, the NDP and Conservative parties are running neck and neck ahead of this weekend’s election. In New Brunswick, the race between the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives is equally tight. In Saskatchewan, Premier Scott Moe’s lead over the NDP appears to be more comfortable.

In each of these elections — and in the important municipal elections that are also happening across the country in weeks and months ahead — voters face the task of working out which candidate is best equipped to serve as their representative.

In the work that our politicians do on our behalf — their legislative votes, their policy advocacy, their casework, their community service — we want them to behave in ways that reflect our policy attitudes and priorities.

But do they?

Pathways to representation

In political science research, the relationship between politicians and citizens is typically thought to arise through one of two pathways.

In the first pathway, politicians represent their constituents’ preferences because they share those preferences — they agree with their constituents. We call this the “congruence” pathway.

In the second pathway, politicians represent their constituents’ preferences because they know those preferences and choose to represent them. This is the “knowledge” pathway.

Both pathways are thought to lead to the same destination: representation of constituents’ preferences by politicians.

But think for a moment about which pathway you would prefer for your representative to take: congruence or knowledge? Which option do you think provides the best representation for citizens?

We’ll tell you our own answers to these questions shortly. But first we need to understand just how different these pathways really are.

Measuring policy representation

In an upcoming article, our goal was to explore how well politicians perform on the congruence pathway and how many perform well on the knowledge pathway.

To answer these questions, we began with a very large survey of the Canadian public, asking more than 10,000 Canadians for their opinions on nine policy issues. These included gun control, immigration, trade with China, taxes, public transit investment and climate change — a wide variety of important policies.

We used this survey to make an estimate of the proportion of people who supported and opposed each policy statement across hundreds of municipalities.

Then, using the Canadian Municipal Barometer’s annual survey of municipal politicians, we asked politicians to guess the percentage of their constituents who support each policy statement. We also asked for each politician’s personal opinion on each statement.

These two surveys — one of the Canadian public, and the other of hundreds of Canadian municipal politicians — allowed us to measure and compare the two pathways.

Two pathways or one?

Let’s start with the good news: In general, politicians do a good job on both pathways. Across nine issues and hundreds of politicians, we found that nearly 60 per cent of politicians performed well on both pathways, and another 19 per cent performed well on at least one pathway.

The bad news is that politicians’ performance on both pathways is highly variable. On some policy issues, like gun control, nearly all politicians perform extremely well. On other issues, like immigration, politicians struggle.

But the most striking thing we discovered in our data was that the two pathways are closely related: Politicians who performed well on one pathway also tended to perform well on the other.

It turns out that these “pathways to representation” may not be very distinct after all.

Choosing your pathway

So, returning to our earlier question:

Which should you prefer? Should citizens choose politicians who represent their views through the congruence pathway or the knowledge pathway?

Our research suggests that most of the time, citizens don’t have to make the choice, because the two skills are so strongly connected. But suppose you did have to choose — what should you prioritize?

Personally, we’d choose congruence and would recommend focusing on finding a candidate who agrees with you on the things you care about, and support them.

Why prefer congruence? Because recent research shows that politicians struggle to think beyond their own beliefs when making guesses about their constituents’ attitudes. When politicians think about what their constituents want, they tend to assume that their constituents agree with them on various issues.

Our research has shown that they’re often right — congruence and knowledge are closely related. But this isn’t always the case, and politicians tend to think (much like the rest of us) that other people agree with them even when, sometimes, they don’t.

Ask policy questions

The good news is that politicians do tend to do reasonably well on both pathways, according our findings, so in real-world elections, you won’t typically be faced with this choice.

But when a political candidate comes to your door asking for your vote, here’s our advice: don’t quiz them about local public opinion, or ask them how often they’d conduct public opinion polls after they get elected.

Instead, ask them some questions about policy issues you care deeply about, and pick the candidate who shares your views.

You’ll be making your choices based on congruence — one of the two possible pathways to representation. But our research suggests that if your local representative aligns well with constituents, they’ll be a good performer on knowledge as well.

Jack Lucas, Professor of Political Science, University of Calgary; Lior Sheffer, Senior Lecturer, Political Science, Tel Aviv University, and Peter Loewen, Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, Cornell University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.