Question

How analysis of vote views affect decisions by legislative leaders in recommending or positioning national policies

Answer 1

Ans) First, the very idea of representative democracy is based on the fact that the preferences of the individual constituents do not make for good decisions in complex questions. The Federalist Papers still provide one of the most readable general arguments on the matter, but modern research confirms that only 'elites' fulfill the information requirements of rational choice. In other words: In representative democracies, decisions are likely to differ from the preferences of constituents, because they supposed to be based on more information than most constituents bother to process. Differences do not indicate a systematic problem.
- Secondly, voter preferences usually include impossible demands, such as high levels of service, no paying for it. Decades of studies in cognitive sciences have shown that human decision making is systematically biased, for example underestimating future cost of decisions with long-term impacts. This second aspect means that the decisions of representatives who actually consider the public good are, again, expected to differ from the preferences expressed by constituents. Differences between decisions and constituents' preferences might, therefore, actually indicate a good and desirable thing - responsible and sustainable decision making.

- So in order to 'improve' the situation, one would have to first establish that the deviation is a form of corruption - meaning that the decision biases the result in favor of some constituents at the expense of overall social welfare. Here, many of the arguments in previous comments come to the front: The influence of lobbies where election campaigns need paying, the influence of unions and the public sector in countries that have party-based election system. In many developing countries, a fundamental mismatch exists between a minority of constituents who are integrated with the formal economy, pay taxes and interested in good policies, and a vast majority of poorer constituents that act as vote-banks for corrupt elites because they 'prefer' short-term handouts even though they are against their own interest.