COMMENTARY | Thanks in part to corporate lobbying, lawmakers think constituents are more conservative than they are
Midterm elections are long over. But do our elected leaders really know or care what we think about critical issues?
Unfortunately, the evidence is not very reassuring, with several studies concluding that state and federal politicians believe their constituents are far more conservative than they really are. The good news is that this means there is far more support for a progressive political agenda than one might imagine from reading the corporate-controlled media or past government policies. The bad news is that without sustained popular activism it is doubtful that our elected leaders will change their policies accordingly.
The misinformed views of those running for state office
Two political scientists, David E. Broockman and Christopher Skovron, surveyed candidates running for state legislative offices across the U.S. in August 2012, before the upcoming election. They asked them their own positions and to estimate their constituents’ positions on same-sex marriage and universal health care. Then they compared candidate estimates with constituent responses to questions on those issues that were included in a large national survey. They found that “politicians consistently and substantially overestimated support for conservative positions among their constituents on these issues.”
More specifically:
“... 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 percent of politicians with conservative views appear to overestimate their constituents’ support for conservative policies. ... Comparable figures for liberal politicians also show a slight conservative bias: in fact, about 70 percent of liberal officeholders typically underestimate support for liberal positions on these issues among their constituents.”
And, when Broockman and Skovron resurveyed the politicians in November, they found that “politicians’ perceptions of public opinion after the campaign and the election itself look identical to their perceptions prior to these events, with little evidence that their misperceptions had been corrected.”
The two scholars did another survey in 2014, this time asking about more issues, including ones dealing with gay and lesbian marriage, gun control, the right to abortion and the legalization of undocumented immigrants. Again, they found that “politicians from both parties believed that support for conservative positions on these issues in their constituencies was much higher than it actually was. These misperceptions are large, pervasive, and robust.”
It’s no better at the federal level
Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Matto Mildenberger and Leah C. Stokes, also political scientists, did a similar study on the federal level. In 2016 they surveyed the top legislative staffers of every House and Senate member, asking them to estimate their constituents’ support for repealing Obamacare, regulating carbon dioxide, making a $305 billion investment in infrastructure, mandating universal background checks for firearm purchases and raising the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour. Then, they compared their estimates to district or state-level survey results.
They summarized their findings as follows:
“ ... if we took a group of people who reflected the makeup of America and asked them whether they supported background checks for gun sales, nine out of 10 would say yes. But congressional aides guessed as few as one in 10 citizens in their district or state favored the policy. Shockingly, 92 percent of the staff members we surveyed underestimated support in their district or state for background checks, including all Republican aides and over 85 percent of Democratic aides. The same is true for the four other issues we looked at ... On climate change, the average aide thought only a minority of his or her district wanted action, when in truth a majority supported regulating carbon.”
The authors also found corporate lobbying to be an important cause of this misrepresentation of public opinion. As Hertel-Fernandez, Mildenberger and Stokes explain, “Aides who reported meeting with groups representing big business – like the United States Chamber of Commerce or the American Petroleum Institute – were more likely to get their constituents’ opinions wrong compared with staffers who reported meeting with mass membership groups that represented ordinary Americans, like the Sierra Club or labor unions.” Strikingly, 62 percent of staffers believed that “correspondence from businesses” was “more representative of their constituents’ preferences than correspondence from ordinary constituents.”
The challenge ahead
None of this means that we should abandon electoral work. However, these findings do make clear that simply working to elect “good” people, and hoping for the best, will likely do little to counter the country’s right-wing drift. There are real forces in play encouraging politicians and their staff to create their own realities favorable to conservative positions, including the willingness of conservatives to aggressively and regularly communicate their views to their representatives and, no doubt more importantly, corporate lobbying backed by financial contributions and a careful monitoring of votes.
We can overcome these forces but only if we build strong popular movements that are able to organize and mobilize people to fight for the things we want, thereby shifting the terms of political debate and the consciousness of politicians in the process. Although this is obviously no simple task, it is important to keep in mind that the studies highlighted above also show that there is widespread support in this country for real progressive change.
Martin Hart-Landsberg is a professor emeritus of economics at Lewis & Clark College.
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