Researching political inequality

For over a decade, Professor Yvette Peters at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Bergen, has studied representative democracy through research on citizen-state relations. Her research focuses on political inequality and mechanisms that shape democratic representation, including why some groups are better represented than others.

The state of democracy 

Peters' interest in citizen inclusion into politics was developed during her doctoral studies at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, where she examined how institutions shape people's political behavior. She continued this work during her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Bergen, which began in 2013, and quickly moved to examine more in detail the mechanism of representation, linking citizens to the government.

In 2017, she was awarded a Starting Grant from the Trond Mohn Research Foundation (external link), enabling her to assemble a research team and pursue these questions in greater depth, through the project The Politics of Inequality: How Representative Democracy (Mal-)Functions in Europe.

In this project, Peters and her colleagues examined the state of democracy in Norway and several other European countries by collecting data on the relationship between citizens and public authorities.

More specifically, the project focused on two core democratic concepts: representation, referring to the extent to which citizens’ preferences are reflected in political decisions, and political equality, which concerns whether different groups are equally able to have their interests represented in political processes.

“We identified numerous challenges related to political representation. One of our findings was that citizens with higher incomes and higher levels of education are often better represented politically than those with fewer economic and educational resources,” Peters explains.

Working on a new project

Today, Peters is a professor at the Department of Comparative Politics, UiB. She highlights the department’s strong research environment and supportive colleagues as an ideal setting for conducting ambitious projects. Within that encouraging environment, she is developing a research project examining another aspect of unequal representation. Specifically, she is interested in the mechanisms through which certain groups are able to mobilize enough political support to “overcrowd” the political space, even if their opinions are not shared by a majority.

Peters intends to build on the methodological approach developed in the “Politics of Inequality” project. One important innovation was the establishment of the Panel of Elected Representatives (PER), currently known as The Norwegian Panel of Politicians, which Peters initiated and led for five years. Data from the panel were combined with survey data from the general population, providing a strong basis for comparing the views and preferences of politicians and citizens.

Equal rights, unequal possibilities

These experiences will play an important role in her proposed project. She plans to analyse and compare findings from as many as 16 countries, hoping to generate new knowledge about a common challenge facing many democracies today: ensuring that all citizens have equal opportunities to make their voices heard in politics.

“We see inequalities in political representation and influence in democracies around the world. That means that those democracies do not really function as intended, because some groups have better opportunities than others to shape political debates and decisions. I believe that it is important to get a better understanding of the mechanisms that create these differences,” Peters says.