Who Do European Parties Represent? How Western European Parties Represent the Policy Preferences of Opinion Leaders

Several recent studies explore how American politicians represent the policy views of subconstituencies within the electorate. We extend this perspective to 12 West European democracies over the period 1973–2002 to examine how mainstream parties responded to electoral subconstituencies. We find that parties were highly responsive to the views of opinion leaders, i.e., citizens who regularly engaged in political discussions and persuasion; by contrast we find no evidence that other types of voters substantively influenced parties’ policy programmes. We also identify significant time lags in mainstream parties’ responses to opinion leaders’ policy beliefs. Our findings have interesting implications for subconstituency representation, for understanding parties’ internal policymaking processes, and for spatial modeling.