Ruth Dassonneville

While recent research has produced robust objective evidence of unequal representation in democracies, there is little evidence about whether this inequality is consistent with individuals’ subjective perceptions of their own political efficacy. To answer this question, we use all available data on political efficacy from the International Social Survey Programme modules for 46 countries (1996–2016) to investigate trends and correlates of external and internal political efficacy. We focus on socio-demographic characteristics that are central to recent literature on unequal representation: gender, education, and income. Our individual-level findings show that education and income are positively associated with both external and internal efficacy while being female is associated with lower levels of internal efficacy but unrelated to external efficacy. We complement these individual-level analyses with a contextual investigation of how descriptive representation contributes to efficacy gaps. Focusing on gender, we show that women feel that they have more of a say in governmental decisions in contexts with a higher level of female representation among elected representatives. We conclude by noting how future research can leverage cross-national data to identify contextual mechanisms that may have an impact upon persistent social gaps in political efficacy across contexts and over time.

A large and growing body of research draws attention to the rising salience of socio‐cultural and identitarian issues and, potentially, the emergence of a new political cleavage that divides voters on those issues. However, the micro‐foundations of this transformation are less well understood. Here we take a voter‐perspective to evaluate how party competition has been restructured in the eyes of the voter. We leverage measures of citizens’ self‐reported probabilities to vote for alternative political parties in the European Election Study voter surveys between 1999 and 2019 in order to map electoral affinity and opposition among party families. We estimate to what extent spatial location on the economic left–right dimension and the GAL‐TAN dimension explain the patterns that emerge, and how this has changed over time. Our results provide evidence of a substantial shift in voter assessment from party competition structured along the economic left–right dimension to competition structured along the GAL‐TAN dimension. We also find great separation of TAN parties from other parties, with the deepest antipathy between the TAN parties and greens.