210142 SE M11: Research Practice (2023S)

How do citizens want to be represented in politics? Is it more important for them that politicians share their policy goals (e.g. opinions on taxes, childcare, or immigration) or descriptive characteristics (e.g. being a woman or belonging to an ethnic minority)? Do citizens want politicians to mainly rely on their own judgment and do what they think is “right” for society, or do they prefer representatives that primarily find out what citizens want and follow these wishes closely? Can citizens imagine to be represented by politicians they did not vote for, or even by activists or celebrities that have never run in an election (e.g. Greta Thunberg, U2 singer Bo-no)?

This course provides an introduction to doing research on citizens’ preferences and views on political representation, following the research process from concept definition to analysis. We start by reviewing the concept of political representation and the different aspects that constitute representative practice (e.g. politicians’ policy positions, their socio-demographic background, how they speak, whom they address, how they relate to their party or how much they care about re-election). In a second step, we review the still small but exciting literature on how citizens want to be represented in politics. We will identify questions on which we already have a lot of evidence and knowledge about citizens’ preferences towards representation and questions that we deem important but that have not been tackled sufficiently. While most work in the field is based on surveys of citizens and uses quantitative methods, we will also review qualitative studies using in-depth interviews or focus groups with citizens. In a third step, we will learn more about two types of research designs that allow us to elicit citizens’ preferences towards representation, namely in-depth interviews and survey experiments. We will read key methodological pieces on these designs as well as literature explaining how to practically implement them. Finally, students will conduct and analyze an anonymous in-depth interview about representation with someone from their social network as well as design their own survey experiment on citizens’ representation preferences. We will wrap-up by discussing how our own research during the course has improved our understanding of citizens’ representation preferences compared to what we already knew from the literature.

Upon successful completion of the course, students should be able to:
• Understand and further develop conceptions of citizens’ representation preferences
• Critically engage with literature on how citizens want to be represented in politics
• Independently develop research questions on citizens’ representation preferences that address gaps in the field
• Design, implement and analyze research on citizens’ representation preferences using survey or interview instruments