Representation Gaps

The folks behind populist political groups have long claimed that their campaigns fill a “political representation gap” that the existing parties fail to account for.

The nature of these purported gaps vary by country and time period, but many recent examples for right-leaning populist movements revolve around things like immigration and rights that have been granted to traditionally excluded groups (like those of a lower ‘caste,’ homosexuals, or those of a lower economic class) gaining rights or benefits (the right to vote, the right to marry, social safety nets) that were previously exclusive to those who don’t like the changing state of affairs and who thus support these populist movements.

This idea that mainstream political parties are failing to represent a large portion of the population through their lawmaking, and that further, this lack of representation suggests a fundamental failure of the democratic system, hadn’t ever really been thoroughly assessed until a flurry of studies were conducted between 2019 and 2024, looking at various facets of this claim.

One study found that (in the EU) right-wing populist groups do seem to fill representation gaps, because parliamentarians near-universally are about one standard-deviation more culturally liberal than the people they represent.

That seems to be the case in nearly all 27 assessed countries, applies to nearly all cultural issues, is true across nearly all mainstream political parties, and holds across all major demographic groups.

So politicians are a bit more liberal than the people who elect them, and this, it stands to reason, creates a gap (approximately a standard-deviation wide) between what’s happening in the government and what the people on the ground would like to see happening. Right-wing populist groups claim to fill this gap.

There’s a chance that this gap exists, at least in part, because the priorities of politicians and the priorities of non-politicians (whatever their respective political leanings) will sometimes be at odds because of what’s legible and vital to these two groups.

In the case of immigration, for instance, many politicians support it, even when their constituents do not, because immigration tends to be a net-positive for the countries that see inflows of more workers, more people who start companies, and more tax-payers to help maintain roads and pay for schools and such. Their goal is to goose these numbers, so immigration will often feel like an obvious win to them.

For the folks on the ground, though, things might not be as straightforward. In Germany’s case, there’s evidence that the right-wing populist party AfD has done so well because it has almost entirely focused on the issue of immigration from Muslim-majority countries. Government-collected data show that most Germans in the 20-teens said they didn’t want more immigration from these countries because they felt it was creating uncomfortable cultural issues in their neighborhoods and straining social systems, but politicians from the major political parties continued to pass legislation that either maintained or increased immigration from those countries.

The same general trend seemed to play out across Europe, which perhaps helps explain why right-wing populism in particular has been on such a tear in the region over the past decade.

While this suggests populism does help fill representation gaps in some instances, the claim that populism is a solution to fundamental issues with democracies doesn’t seem to hold as much water.

Research from 2023 indicates that while there seem to be substantial non-systemic representation gaps in some areas, there doesn’t seem to be a fundamental issue with the structure of these systems; it’s a problem of representation, platform focus, and messaging, basically, rather than an unfixable flaw in the way these democracies function.