A study by David Broockman and Christopher Skovron finds that American politicians from both sides of the political spectrum hold mistaken opinions about the attitudes among their constituents concerning liberal/conservative policy.
Politicians consistently and substantially overestimate support for conservative positions among their constituents on these issues. The differences we discover in this regard are exceptionally large among conservative politicians: across both issues we examine, conservative politicians appear to overestimate support for conservative policy views among their constituents by over 20 percentage points on average. In fact, on each of the issues we examine, over 90% of politicians with conservative views appear to overestimate their constituents’ support for conservative policies. This misperception is so large that nearly half of sitting conservative officeholders appear to believe that they represent a district that is more conservative on these issues than the most conservative legislative district in the entire country despite the fact that over half of these officeholders actually support positions more conservative than their own districts’ median voter. Comparable figures for liberal politicians also show a slight conservative bias: in fact, about 70% of liberal officeholders typically underestimate support for liberal positions on these issues among their constituents. These differences by elite ideology persist among all varieties of politicians: those from highly professionalized legislative bodies, those running in competitive elections, and those who have been in office for many years.
via The Daily Dish.
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