Multidimensional Representation: Enabling An Alternative Research Agenda on the Citizen-Politician Relationship

Introduction

Political representation - the relationship between politicians and citizens - is at the core of democracy's legitimacy and functioning. Most empirical research in political science studies two aspects of representation:

1. Whether politicians' substantive policy preferences match those of the citizenry.
2. Whether representatives are "like" their constituents in terms of descriptive characteristics (e.g. gender or race).

Additional Dimensions of Representation

However, recent research in political theory has highlighted additional dimensions of the citizen-politician relationship. These include:

• Whether citizens identify with politicians they have not voted for.
• How politicians relate to their party.

This research argues that citizens' own views of how they want to be represented should be the starting point for studying representation. Yet, these insights have barely affected how representation is studied in quantitative political science, suggesting that we may currently neglect important aspects of representation.

Project Goals

MULTIREP aims to ascertain whether citizens care about further dimensions of representation and develop the methodological tools to study them, thereby fundamentally reshaping the scope and depth of empirical research in the field.

Methodology

First, it uses in-depth citizen interviews and survey-experimental techniques to determine how people think about representation and which dimensions are most important to them.

Second, for the most important dimensions, it develops novel quantitative survey and text-analytical tools to measure citizens' preferences and politicians' behavior.

Third, it advances and operationalizes normative standards to assess the quality of representation on these dimensions on the basis of empirical data.

Conclusion

Thereby, MULTIREP will enable an alternative research agenda on the citizen-politician relationship that takes a broader perspective. Given citizens' declining trust in democratic politics, we cannot afford to maintain an incomplete picture of what it means for citizens to feel "represented."