Disconnect between the public face and the voting behavior of political representatives

One of representative democracy’s tenets is that a political candidate runs on a specific platform, which is information the electorate uses to determine whether to vote for them or not. If this promise is to be maintained, it is fundamental that the public face candidates present corresponds to their actions in parliament once elected. Such a promise has been put in question both by scholars, but also by the electorate. In different countries at different times, the people have expressed various degrees of dissatisfaction with democracy: often the feeling is that representatives put their own interests—or the interest of a powerful minority—before the ones of their constituencies. In this paper, we propose a network-based quantitative investigation of this disconnect between the public face and the voting behavior of elected representatives. By using data from Denmark, we can place politicians in two different spaces, determined by their electoral campaign promises on the one hand, and on the other hand by the votes they cast in parliament. We find that our technique makes it possible both to find clear, expected, and consistent left-right divides between the political parties; as well as a larger-than-expected disconnect between the public face and the voting behavior. Our preliminary results indicate that the aggregate voting behavior in parliament of politicians does not match with how they present themselves to the public on the salient issues discussed during the election campaign.