Political representation in an era of income inequality and post-truth politics

It’s widely thought that income inequality and shifts toward post-truth politics would normatively affect election outcomes. This study is the first I know of to incorporate both phenomena in a model of electoral competition. It applies the model to examine steps governments could take to strengthen substantive versus symbolic representation as these have been conceived by Pitkin (The concept of representation, University of California Press, California, 1967). Multiple parties funded by private contributions and public transfers compete in platforms and campaign messaging for aligned electors. Electors learn directly from that messaging, making their alignment, contribution and voting decisions both on whether a party’s competence and platform would enable it to act in their interest and thus represent them substantively, and on whether a party’s charisma, image and allegations and the political narratives they motivate provide gratification, allowing the party to represent them symbolically. Restrictive conditions ensure that all electors align with the party best able to act in their interest. Under more general conditions, misalignment is inevitable and increases with income inequality to the extent that shifts toward post-truth politics have taken place. Independently, such shifts increase voter abstention by both alienation and indifference, further weakening the extent of substantive representation. Although governments could reduce misalignment both by tying the distribution of campaign finance across political space more to electors and less to income and by curtailing the sources of specious political narratives, such steps—even if constitutionally and technically possible—would not reduce the abstention caused by a greater appetite for those narratives: a more intractable problem.