Delegation gap in the Czech Republic. Do the political elites share the democratic attitudes with their voters?
Abstract
Many political scientists are watching with concern how new and traditional European democracies cope with current policy challenges (Pietsch, Miller, & Karp, 2015). One of the common denominators of analyzes of Czech politics in the new millennium is disaffection (Linek, 2016).
At the same time, a radical change of the party system, the increasing distrust of voters to traditional parties and the victory of the "antiestablishment" policy are characteristic for Czech politics. Czech voters feel a political disaffection, and how the political elites assess this situation? Can we find differences between voters and elected elites in understanding democracy as such? Is the core issue of Czech democracy a different perception of the democratic mandate? If we use the theory of principal and agent to describe the relationship between voters and their representatives, we can say that the voters as principals conclude a contract with their agents, who, however, understand the content of the contract differently than the contracting authority.
The chain of the delegation is problematic at the very beginning (Strom, 2006). It is assumed that voters, as principals, have the same value system as their elected agents.
Moreover, the agent's position is complicated by his anchoring, the understanding of the mandate is influenced by the structure of his political party (Müller, 2000). My research builds on ESS 6 data that explored the understanding and evaluation of democracy by Europeans.
The replication of selected issues allows us to monitor how the democratic attitudes of Czech voters have changed over the past 5 years. We can monitor the impact of growing populist movements on increasing the support of direct democracy instruments, nationwide referenda.
However, to analyze the relationship between the first two articles of the delegation chain, we necessarily need to complement research on the research of elected elites. The same questions were asked, examining the content of democratic values and, moreover, questions revealing the perception of his own act of representation.
Different understanding of democracy between ordinary people and political elites constitutes the delegation gap. It seems that the newly elected agents correspond to the ideas of their principals even less than the agents from the traditional parties.
Deficit in the relationship between the principal and the agent is, therefore, paradoxically deepening in Czech politics, the growing fears about the stability of democracy in the country are to be right in this respect.