TY - JOUR

T1 - Policy Representation in Europe

T2 - The 2018 Peter Mair Lecture

AU - Rasmussen, Anne

PY - 2019

Y1 - 2019

N2 - A key challenge of democratic societies is to ensure a continuous flow of information between the people and elites in order to secure representation of citizen preferences. While there may be occasions where deviations from citizen preferences are desirable, political systems with a sustained and systematic mismatch between citizen opinion and policy would typically not be considered democratic. Political parties have traditionally acted as key channels of representation helping to transmit citizen preferences to policy-makers. Yet their ability to secure democratic representation has been called into question. The lecture explores the state of democratic representation in Europe by presenting evidence from the GovLis Research Programme ‘When does Government Listen to the Public’ on the link between public opinion and policy on a large number of policy issues. Beyond parties, it explores a series of alternative channels of citizen representation by considering the ability of political institutions and engagement in civil society associations to strengthen the link between public opinion and policy

AB - A key challenge of democratic societies is to ensure a continuous flow of information between the people and elites in order to secure representation of citizen preferences. While there may be occasions where deviations from citizen preferences are desirable, political systems with a sustained and systematic mismatch between citizen opinion and policy would typically not be considered democratic. Political parties have traditionally acted as key channels of representation helping to transmit citizen preferences to policy-makers. Yet their ability to secure democratic representation has been called into question. The lecture explores the state of democratic representation in Europe by presenting evidence from the GovLis Research Programme ‘When does Government Listen to the Public’ on the link between public opinion and policy on a large number of policy issues. Beyond parties, it explores a series of alternative channels of citizen representation by considering the ability of political institutions and engagement in civil society associations to strengthen the link between public opinion and policy

KW - Faculty of Social Sciences

KW - Representation

KW - Policy responsiveness

KW - Associational engagement

KW - Interest groups

KW - Political institutions

U2 - 10.1080/07907184.2019.1606144

DO - 10.1080/07907184.2019.1606144

M3 - Journal article

VL - 34

SP - 327

EP - 349

JO - Irish Political Studies

JF - Irish Political Studies

SN - 0790-7184

IS - 3

ER -