Public voices in the heavenly chorus? Group type bias and opinion representation

While strong voices in the academic literature and real-world politics regard interest groups as biased representatives of the public, we know little about the scope and consequences of such biases for democratic governance. We conduct the first cross-national comparison of group and public preferences analyzing a new dataset of 50 issues in five West European countries. Despite the negative image of interest groups in politics, we find that their positions are in line with public opinion more than half the time. Moreover, while firms and business associations enjoy weaker support for their positions among citizens than public interest groups, they still enjoy the backing of a sizable share of the public. Additionally, we find no general pattern that communities with low interest group diversity are less likely to represent public opinion. Our findings have implications for democratic governance and discussions of how to conceptualize and measure biases in interest representation.

尽管学术文献与现实政治领域的主流观点均将利益集团（interest groups）视为带有偏向性的公众代表，但目前学界对这类偏向性的影响范畴及其对民主治理的后果却知之甚少。本研究首次针对利益集团与公众的偏好开展跨国比较分析，所用全新数据集涵盖西欧5个国家的50项议题。尽管政治领域中利益集团的形象向来负面，但研究发现，其立场与公众舆论相符的情况超过半数。此外，尽管企业与商业协会（business associations）的立场在民众中获得的支持度低于公共利益集团（public interest groups），但仍有相当比例的公众支持其立场。此外，研究未发现利益集团多样性较低的社群更难代表公众舆论的普遍规律。本研究结论对民主治理以及如何概念化、衡量利益代表中的偏向性相关讨论具有启示意义。