Stefaan Walgrave

University of Antwerp | UA · Department of Political Sciences

While political scientists regularly engage in spirited theoretical debates about elections and voting behavior, few have noticed that elected politicians also have theories of elections and voting. Here, we investigate politicians’ positions on eight central theoretical debates in the area of elections and voting behavior and compare politicians’...

Discussions about the ‘crisis of representative democracy’ have dominated scholarly and public discourse for some time now. But what does this phrase actually entail, and what is its relevance today? How do citizens themselves experience, feel and respond to this ‘crisis’? Bitter-Sweet Democracy grapples with the complexities of these questions in...

Political representation can be described as a process brought about via an electoral and a perceptual path. Drawing on original survey data on the perceptual accuracy of elected representatives in Belgium, Canada and Switzerland, this study explores whether and how the two paths are connected. It shows, first, that representatives who more accurat...

This study examines the micro-level foundations of how policy responsiveness may come about. Our study builds on the assumption that elected officials' information source use shapes their policy actions. We analyze the variation in information sources elected officials rely on for agenda-setting and policy formulation, distinguishing between public...

Politicians’ perceptions of public opinion matter for substantive representation, but previous work has concluded that they do not have very accurate perceptions of voters’ policy preferences. We add to the debate on the drivers of perceptual accuracy by exploring whether politicians have a more accurate understanding of public opinion when it matt...

Politicians learning about public opinion and responding to their resulting perceptions is one key way via which responsive policy-making comes about. Despite the strong normative importance of politicians’ understanding of public opinion, empirical evidence on how politicians learn about these opinions in the first place is scant. Drawing on surve...

In an influential recent study, Broockman and Skovron (2018) found that American politicians consistently overestimate the conservativeness of their constituents on a host of issues. Whether this conservative bias in politicians’ perceptions of public opinion is a uniquely American phenomenon is an open question with broad implications for the qual...

Research has shown that politicians’ perceptions of public opinion are subject to social projection. When estimating the opinions of voters on a broad range of issues, politicians tend to assume that their own preferences are shared by voters. This article revisits this finding and adds to the literature in three ways. First, it makes a conceptual...

Journalists and news media in Western democracies appear to be under increasing fire for having an alleged partisan bias. This study joins the increasing number of studies on partisan news slant, and focuses on the central actors in the news-making process, namely journalists themselves. Drawing on unique survey evidence on 233 Belgian and Dutch jo...

Politicians regularly bargain with colleagues and other actors. Bargaining dynamics are central to theories of legislative politics and representative democracy, bearing directly on the substance and success of legislation, policy, and on politicians’ careers. Yet, controlled evidence on how legislators bargain is scarce. Do they apply different st...

Politicians care a lot about public opinion, they put great effort into getting to know what the people want. They almost constantly assess public opinion through a large variety of sources. And although most of them define themselves as trustees, in their actual day-to-day decision-making almost all politicians behave as delegates in the sense tha...

Who takes to the streets to protest matters. Protest sends signals to decision-makers and biased participation leads to biased signals. This paper examines one driver of biased participation, namely protest recruiters behaving as rational prospectors by only inviting others who they believe are likely to agree to the participation request. Extant e...

Demonstrations are legal or illegal gatherings of people in the public domain (squares or streets) voicing economic, social, or political claims. When these people move from point A to B in the public space we call this a demonstration; when they are static we instead call them “rallies.”

Marches are part of the classic action repertoire of social movements. They are a form of protest closely connected to rallies and demonstrations. In the case of rallies, marches are the relatively organized means through which an aggregation of individuals gets from point A to point B, coming to assemble in a common space for the purpose of a prot...

News diversity is an important concern of journalism scholars, as its presence or absence can have a profound effect on democratic debate and the information available to citizens. Many have speculated that news diversity decreases over time, due to changing economic circumstances. This expectation especially applies to newspapers. Using nearly two...

Politicians care a lot about public opinion, they put great effort into getting to know what the people want. They almost constantly assess public opinion through a large variety of sources. And although most of them define themselves as trustees, in their actual day-to-day decision-making almost all politicians behave as delegates in the sense tha...

Politicians care a lot about public opinion, they put great effort into getting to know what the people want. They almost constantly assess public opinion through a large variety of sources. And although most of them define themselves as trustees, in their actual day-to-day decision-making almost all politicians behave as delegates in the sense tha...

Politicians care a lot about public opinion, they put great effort into getting to know what the people want. They almost constantly assess public opinion through a large variety of sources. And although most of them define themselves as trustees, in their actual day-to-day decision-making almost all politicians behave as delegates in the sense tha...

Politicians care a lot about public opinion, they put great effort into getting to know what the people want. They almost constantly assess public opinion through a large variety of sources. And although most of them define themselves as trustees, in their actual day-to-day decision-making almost all politicians behave as delegates in the sense tha...

Politicians care a lot about public opinion, they put great effort into getting to know what the people want. They almost constantly assess public opinion through a large variety of sources. And although most of them define themselves as trustees, in their actual day-to-day decision-making almost all politicians behave as delegates in the sense tha...

Politicians care a lot about public opinion, they put great effort into getting to know what the people want. They almost constantly assess public opinion through a large variety of sources. And although most of them define themselves as trustees, in their actual day-to-day decision-making almost all politicians behave as delegates in the sense tha...

Politicians care a lot about public opinion, they put great effort into getting to know what the people want. They almost constantly assess public opinion through a large variety of sources. And although most of them define themselves as trustees, in their actual day-to-day decision-making almost all politicians behave as delegates in the sense tha...

Politicians care a lot about public opinion, they put great effort into getting to know what the people want. They almost constantly assess public opinion through a large variety of sources. And although most of them define themselves as trustees, in their actual day-to-day decision-making almost all politicians behave as delegates in the sense tha...

Politicians care a lot about public opinion, they put great effort into getting to know what the people want. They almost constantly assess public opinion through a large variety of sources. And although most of them define themselves as trustees, in their actual day-to-day decision-making almost all politicians behave as delegates in the sense tha...

Politicians care a lot about public opinion, they put great effort into getting to know what the people want. They almost constantly assess public opinion through a large variety of sources. And although most of them define themselves as trustees, in their actual day-to-day decision-making almost all politicians behave as delegates in the sense tha...

Elites forming a perception of what the public wants is an important way in which democratic representation comes about, the assumption holds. Yet very few are the studies that examine the effect of elite perceptions on politician action. This study sets out to revisit the matter, measuring actual public priorities, elite perceptions of public prio...

An important challenge facing political decision making today is inequality in representation. Political scientists have shown that the preferences of certain groups—especially those who have higher incomes or are better educated—systematically preponderate in political decision making. Trying to elucidate the mechanisms behind these findings, this...

Politicians’ understanding of public opinion constitutes a crucial factor in the representational relationship between them and the public. Therefore, politicians staying abreast of what citizens want and why they want it matters for democratic representation. In this study, we examine how intensely politicians monitor public opinion and why there...

Party competition in Western Europe is increasingly focused on “issue competition”, which is the selective emphasis on issues by parties. The aim of this paper is to contribute methodologically to the increasing number of studies that deal with different aspects of parties’ issue competition and communication. We systematically compare the value an...

Democratic representation presumes that politicians know what the public wants. Ideally, politicians have accurate perceptions not only of which policies citizens prefer (positions), but also of which issues citizens prefer to be dealt with first (priorities). How accurate are elites’ perceptions of the public’s priorities? And, if elite estimation...

Ample work in political communication showed that high-level politicians get more media attention than their lower ranking colleagues. With power comes media attention. More than hard work, charisma, or experience, it is the political function performed by politicians that is the crucial factor in explaining how much media attention they receive. B...

Decades of research found that protest participation is unequally distributed over the population. The usual protesters are resourceful, skilled, and politically engaged. We theorize that “open channel” mobilization and mobilization via strong persuasion ties is able to bring unusual protesters to the streets. Additionally, we explore the contextua...

Social movement scholars have frequently pointed to individuals' personal networks to explain protest participation. While the recruitment function of micro networks-the being asked part of mobilization-has been explored in depth, the support effect of networks received only scant attention. The study explores to what extent and how social support...

Party competition in Western Europe is increasingly focused on “issue competition”, which is the selective emphasis on issues by parties. The aim of this paper is to contribute methodologically to the increasing number of studies that deal with different aspects of parties’ issue competition and communication. We systematically compare the value an...

Recent research demonstrates that political parties in western Europe are generally structured along one dimension – and often take more or less similar ideological positions on the economic and cultural dimension – whereas the policy preferences of voters are structured two dimensionally; a considerable part of the electorate combines left-wing st...

Politicians seem to be increasingly criticising the traditional news media for being biased. While scholars usually argue that politicians make such claims out of strategic concerns – they try to undermine the credibility of the potentially harmful media – it might as well be that they actually believe there is a bias in traditional news coverage....

This paper investigates whether parties’ issue attacks can successfully discredit their rivals’ issue evaluations. Existing research demonstrates how a party can influence voters’ perceptions of itself on a single dimension of issue competition, but research showing the impact of negative campaigning on parties’ issue evaluations remains limited. B...

How journalists perceive public opinion is important in democracies. These perceptions help journalists to construct meaningful stories and might influence news content. However, little is known about how accurate journalists’ perceptions of public opinion actually are. Using a survey with Belgian (Flemish) political journalists, we analyze their p...

Although recruitment is often studied by social movement scholars, the literature lacks an integrated account of what recruitment actually entails and there is disagreement about who the recruiters are (weak- or strong-tie contacts). This study develops a theoretical account of different recruitment “functions” that can be fulfilled by social ties...

Lors des dernières élections, les Flamands et les Wallons ont clairement voté différemment. En Flandre, c’est surtout le parti national-populiste Vlaams Belang qui a gagné (+12,6% aux régionales), tandis que le Pvda (+2,8%) et Groen (+1,4%) ont légèrement progressé et que les trois partis traditionnels ont perdu du terrain. En Wallonie, les trois p...

We investigate the impact of three issue-related party perceptions on people's vote choices. The positional dimension of issue voting holds that voters are more likely to prefer parties whose policy positions on issues come close to their own policy preferences. The competence dimension of issue voting implies that voters are more inclined to cast...

This chapter discusses the relevance of the protest agenda; it is an indicator of what active segments of the public care about. The literature about the agenda-impact of protest is briefly reviewed, there are few systematic and comparative studies. Almost all protests have as an aim to increase political attention to the underlying issue. But stud...

This chapter discusses what role the media agenda has played in (comparative) agenda research. Studies into the characteristics of the media agenda demonstrate that, compared to other agendas, the media agenda is characterized by high levels of responsiveness and volatility and that various outlets that jointly constitute the agenda strongly influe...

This chapter looks at what scholars of the CAP community have been interested in and working on during the last decade. What are CAP scholars actually doing with their data? Therefore, the study draws on a meta-analysis of the papers that have been presented at CAP conferences 2006–17. We analyze not only the type of agendas that have been examined...

Does the composition of a government affect the beliefs, motivations, and mobilization trajectories of protest participants addressing the government? We make use of a straightforward research design to test how the loss of a left-wing ally in power affected the individual-level characteristics of participants in two ‘twin’ demonstrations. Both dem...

Protest participation has become normalized and all sorts of people resort to protest to demand social and political change. Participation in street demonstrations is the prototypical protest activity of citizens today. This chapter focuses on participation in street demonstrations, it first defines and conceptualizes the phenomenon; what is a stre...

This study examines and discusses survey strategies among political elites at different government levels in three countries; Belgium, Canada and Israel. More specifically, we discuss recruitment strategies that produce high response levels among hard to reach target populations in different political and cultural environments. Next, we also examin...

What politicians devote attention to, is an important question as political attention is a precondition of policy change. We use an experimental design to study politicians’ attention to incoming information and deploy it among large samples of elected politicians in three countries: Belgium, Canada, and Israel. Our sample includes party leaders, m...

The Belgian Agendas Project started in 2001 and has been funded by four different research grants. Initially, the Belgian Project used a codebook other than the common CAP codebook widely used right now. The bulk of the data has been coded manually and now mostly covers the 1999–2010 period (with many datasets going back to earlier periods). A pecu...

Non-Representative Representatives: An Experimental Study of the Decision Making of Elected Politicians - CORRIGENDUM - LIOR SHEFFER, PETER JOHN LOEWEN, STUART SOROKA, STEFAAN WALGRAVE, TAMIR SHEAFER

While being frequently covered in the news media is key to political success, previous research demonstrates that some politicians are systematically more visible in the media than others. The current study advances our understanding of which politicians gain higher media visibility by exploring the effects of their personality traits. Utilizing a...

A considerable body of work in political science is built upon the assumption that politicians are more purposive, strategic decision makers than the citizens who elect them. At the same time, other work suggests that the personality profiles of office seekers and the environment they operate in systematically amplifies certain choice anomalies. Th...

This chapter draws theoretical and empirical lessons from the book. It argues that the evidence in the different chapters clearly underscores the existence of both functions. Politicians are informed by the media, and they enter the media arena. The crucial thing is that the media use of politicians varies across politicians, across issues and, mos...

We employ a novel design to explore to what extent the media are significant information suppliers for politicians. In three countries—Belgium, Canada, and Israel—we surveyed national political elites and asked them about the main, actual media stories published in the weeks preceding the interview. Elites were asked whether they knew about the und...

How do individual politicians use the news media to reach their political goals? The authors argue that this question can be best addressed by using an actor-centered, functional approach. The chapter develops the “Information & Arena” model to distinguish two essential functions the mass media have for political elites. The media are a source of i...

Issue reframing occurs when parties, while addressing an issue, shift the frame towards other policy domains. The literature has found that party issue framing affects how voters think about issues, yet scholars remain largely in the dark as to when and how parties frame issues. The study at hand theorizes and investigates when and how parties refr...

Using evidence from Great Britain, the United States, Belgium and Spain, it is demonstrated in this article that in integrated and divided nations alike, citizens are more strongly attached to political parties than to the social groups that the parties represent. In all four nations, partisans discriminate against their opponents to a degree that...

The media’s role in shaping the priorities of politicians, known as political agenda setting, is usually examined at the institutional level. However, individual politicians’ goals and attitudes are also expected to shape their level of responsiveness to the media. This study is the first to explore how individual politicians’ goals and motivations...

In recent years, communication scholars have expressed concerns about the diversity of news media content. While we live in an era of ‘news abundance’ – the number of outlets and channels has increased enormously – the available news is argued to have become more of the same, but has it? As empirical evidence is lacking, this article verifies wheth...

How do public opinion signals affect political representatives’ opinion formation? To date, we have only limited knowledge about this essential representative process. In this article, we theorize and examine the signaling strength of one type of societal signal: protest. We do so by means of an innovative experiment conducted among Belgian nationa...

Agenda-setting scholars have claimed that the typical punctuated pattern of governmental attention is a consequence of disproportionate information processing. Yet these claims remain unsubstantiated. We tackle this challenge by considering mass media coverage as a source of information for political actors and by examining the relationship between...

The exchange of diverse points of view in elite deliberation is considered a cornerstone of democracy. This study presents evidence that variations in political motivation for media use predict the tendency of politicians to present deliberative rhetoric that considers multiple points of view regarding issues and sees those views as related to one...

Issue ownership has gained a prominent position as one of the key theories to understand how voter’s issue perceptions affect their electoral behavior. Yet, whereas the original theory assumed that party reputations were relatively stable, various studies have shown that issue ownership perceptions fluctuate over time. Despite the growing evidence...

The frame alignment perspective emphasizes the importance of congruence in beliefs between protest participants and protest organizers. Although frame alignment is widely used in social movement research and matters for important movement processes, it has remained largely unclear how we can explain different degrees of frame alignment among protes...

This book investigates how individual politicians and political parties political actors strategically make use of the media to reach their political goals. Looking beyond a purely Americentric viewpoint, the chapters present data from more than ten Western democracies to argue that the media are both a source of information and an arena for politi...

Issue ownership theory expects political parties to focus their campaigns on ‘owned’ issues for which they have a reputation of competence and a history of attention, and to avoid issues that play to the advantage of their opponents. However, recent empirical studies show that parties often campaign on the same issues. The literature has suggested...

The study investigates the impact of media coverage of protest on issue attention in parliament (questions) in six Western European countries. Integrating several data sets on protest, media, and political agendas, we demonstrate that media coverage of protest affects parliamentary agendas: the more media attention protest on an issue receives, the...

Issue ownership, or the idea that some parties are considered by the public to be better able or more committed to dealing with specific issues, is increasingly used in studies of electoral choice. Yet, various scholars have argued that if measures of issue ownership are confounded with party choice, this raises concerns regarding their usability t...

Opinions expressed by the common (wo)man on the street influence audience judgments about perceived public opinion and even people’s own opinion. While we know from experimental research that the distribution of opinions expressed in vox pop interviews—the balance between pro and contra quotes, for example—influences audiences, little research has...

The Importance of VAA Statement Selection. Results from Two Simulations This study examines the impact of statement selection on the output of Voting Advice Applications (VAAs). Moving beyond extant work on this topic which examines the extent to which VAA output matches parties’ true electoral strength, we focus on VAA’s ability to match voters to...

How do individual politicians use the news media to reach their political goals? This study addresses the question by proposing an actor-centered, functional approach. We distinguish 2 essential functions (and subfunctions) the mass media have for political elites. The media are a source of information; politicians depend on it for pure information...

Information in politics is overabundant. Especially elite politicians are bombarded with information. Politicians must be selective to stay on top of the information torrent. Aggregate-level work within the bounded rationality framework showed that information selection is at the core of decision making. Yet, an answer to the question as to how ind...

Political agenda-setting studies have shown that political agendas are influenced by the media agenda. Researchers in the field of media and politics are now focusing on the mechanisms underlying this pattern. This article contributes to the literature by focusing not on aggregate, behavioral political attention for issues (e.g., parliamentary ques...