How Politicians (mis)Perceive Policy Salience

For representation to work well, elected politicians need to have a good grasp not just of which policies citizens support but also of which policies are most salient to citizens. Recent studies have revealed that elected politicians are poor at estimating levels of support for different policies. However, little is previously known about whether politicians are able to judge the salience of policies among citizens. In this study, we take on this task using data from four different countries on politicians’ estimations of the salience of different policies. We find that politicians routinely under-estimate the salience of policies to citizens, and are most likely to under-estimate the salience of a policy when doing so reduces their cognitive dissonance, either because they themselves think a policy is of less significance or because they perceive their own positional preferences to be incongruent with citizens’ preferences. The results demonstrate how motivated reasoning affects politicians’ judgements of citizens’ priorities and highlight a possible cause of voters’ dissatisfaction with the responsiveness of governments and politicians.