Laurenz Guenther on the Representation Gap in Politics
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But it's it's really that the the goals, that parliamentarians and like the average voter disagree on the goal where we should be heading in with society. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. To what extent do politicians and other political leads actually represent? the views of ordinary citizens. On important cultural issues like immigration, are they just not listening to what people want?
And is that perhaps one of the reasons why populism has been rising so much? Is the rise of populism in part a result of voters saying, we've been telling you what we want again and again, all of us old mainstream parties aren't listening to us? Well, I guess we're gonna vote for these new populist forces in order to finally get our voices heard. My guest today has made this argument in a influential paper he published last year.
Laurence Günther is a research fellow at the Toulouse School of Economics and the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, and he has a really interesting set of writings about the cultural representation gap, showing, for example, that in 2013 the average member of a most conservative political party represented in the German Bundestag had more progressive views about immigration than the average voter. And this he thinks helps to explain a lot of the political developments of the last ten years. In the last part of this conversation, Laurence asked me some questions about the extent to which journalists are actually willing to report on uncomfortable issues and reflect the views of ordinary citizens. And I asked him about whether views about immigration might not be a little bit more complicated than he suggests, about whether the better representation of views isn't that
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