Affluence and Preferences for Democratic Representation: The Case of German Citizens and Legislators.

In this paper, we demonstrate that economic inequality influences preferences for democratic representation, as citizens instrumentally prefer those processes that promise to be suitable for pursuing their material interests. People with low wealth favor more responsive and inclusive legislators whom they expect to take their interests more into account that are currently less seldom realized. And highly affluent people favor legislators rather to be qualified and open to particular interests, since their interests are already taken into account. This insight implies three important contributions to the research strands of unequal democracy and process preferences: First, unequal democracy is not limited to biased descriptive representation in parliament or skewed policy responsiveness but also concerns the dimension of process preferences. Second, by putting emphasis on the impact of wealth, we amend the literature on unequal democracy as well as process preferences, as studies in both strands are predominantly concerned with income, level of education, or socio-economic status. Third, we contribute to the literature on process preferences and corroborate recent findings that process preferences are not only normative but also have an instrumental dimension.