Pathways to Substantive Representation: Policy Congruence and Policy Knowledge Among Canadian Local Politicians

In recent years, new data and methods have reinvigorated research on two central elements of elite political behavior: politicians’ congruence with and knowledge of citizens’ opinions. Here, we survey over 700 elected officials in Canada to investigate and quantify the relationship between congruence (i.e. politicians’ alignment with constituents’ attitudes) and knowledge (i.e. politicians’ accurate perception of constituents’ attitudes) as pathways to substantive representation. We find that they are strongly related: congruent politicians also tend to have accurate perceptions of their constituents’ opinions. Individual and contextual correlates of success on each of the two pathways are very similar, but politicians’ performance varies considerably across policy issues. We discuss three main implications of our findings: congruence and perceptual accuracy as components of a single pathway to substantive representation; the need to better understand variation in congruence and perceptual accuracy across policy issues and policy-related factors; and the quality of substantive representation in contemporary democracies.