Working Paper Series, Department of Economics, Uppsala University
No 2004:2:
Do Politicians’ Preferences Correspond to those of the Voters? An Investigation of Political Representation
Matz Dahlberg ()
, Eva Mörk ()
and Hanna Ågren
Abstract: This paper investigates to what extent voters and
politicians have the same preferences for locally provided welfare
services. We make use of two different types of survey questionnaires; one
directed towards voters and one directed towards politicians. We reach two
main conclusions in the paper. First, we find that politicians have
preferences for significantly different spending on locally provided
welfare services compared to voters. Second, this difference remains even
after controlling for politicians and voters having different
socio-economic characteristics. For example, when analyzing female
representation, we find that female politicians have significantly
different preferences for spending than female voters. One implication of
the latter result is that an increase in the ratio of female to male
politicians may not be the only way to deal with the desire to increase the
political representation of women.
Keywords: Political representation; local public; (follow links to similar papers)
JEL-Codes: C35; H40; H72; (follow links to similar papers)
34 pages, January 20, 2004
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- This paper is published as:
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Dahlberg, Matz, Eva Mörk and Hanna Ågren, (2006), 'Do Politicians’ Preferences Correspond to those of the Voters? An Investigation of Political Representation', Public Choice, Vol. 130, No. 1-2, pages 137-162
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