The party road to representation: Unequal responsiveness in party platforms

This paper explores a major road to substantive representation in democracies, by clarifying whether demands of rich and poor citizens get taken up in the party platforms of political parties. Doing so constitutes a substantial broadening and deepening of our understanding of substantive representation – broadening the countries, issue-areas and years that form the empirical basis for judging whether democracies manifest unequal representation; and deepening the detailed process of representation by clarifying a key mechanism connecting societal demands to policy outcomes. The paper hypothesizes that party systems in general will respond more strongly to wealthy than to poor segments of a polity. It also hypothesizes that left parties will more faithfully represent poorer and less significantly represent richer citizens than do right parties. We find substantial support for these expectations in a new dataset that combines multi-country, multi-issue-area, multi-wave survey data with data on party platforms for 38 democracies.