Affluence and Congruence: Unequal Representation Around the World

Do elected representatives reflect the preferences of the citizens they represent? Recent studies from the U.S. and a number of other democracies have found that legislators tend to represent better the preferences of affluent citizens. But we still know little about how widespread this bias is. To answer this question, we gathered every publicly available survey of elected representatives in the world and matched it with mass survey data. Our dataset consists of 92,000 elite observations and 3.9 million citizen observations spread across 565 country-years, 52 individual countries, and 33 years. Using a variety of methods, we find that around the world, legislators' preferences are consistently more congruent with those of affluent citizens. However, we also find that this inequality varies substantially by issue domain: while the affluent are better represented on economic issues, the poor seem to be over-represented on cultural issues. This replication archive contains the code and data necessary to reproduce all analyses presented in the main text and supplemental appendix (but see the README for data limitations).