Responsive to the People? Comparing the European Cognitive Maps of Dutch Political Leaders and their Followers

Abstract

Political leaders are often perceived as unresponsive to the daily concerns of citizens, especially when European integration is concerned. Academic research, however, provides at most mixed evidence for the existence of such a gap. This article tries to shed light on this discrepancy by introducing an alternative measure to study leaders' responsiveness-narrative congruence-and explores the assumption that responsiveness increases leaders' credibility in the eyes of their voters. As narrative congruence is a more intricate measure that captures leaders' and followers' policy preferences and argumentation, it may better capture the gap between their positions and therefore provide a more adequate explanation for citizens' support for their leaders than traditional congruence measures like issue saliency and ideological distance. To provide a first test of this, the technique of cognitive mapping is introduced and used to explore the congruence in beliefs on European integration of four Dutch political leaders and their followers. Although the study finds a significant gap between some leaders and their followers' narratives on Europe, it finds no evidence that this narrative congruence is related to the credibility of these leaders in the eyes of their followers.

Repression and Dissent: How Tit-for-Tat Leads to Violent and Nonviolent Resistance

“…Cognitive mapping traces reasoning processes from the direct speech of political actors. Originally intended to help policy-makers improve their decision-making (Axelrod 1976), cognitive mapping has contributed great insight into subjects as varied as domestic and foreign policy (Galtung 1973;Hart 1977), belief congruence and European integration ( Van Esch, Joosen, and Van Zuydam, 2016), policy-making in complex social-ecological systems (Mehryar et al 2019), or coercive organizational politics (Voyer 1994).…”

“…Typically, cognitive mapping is applied to fields in which direct speech is readily accessible through public records (Axelrod 1976; Levi and Tetlock 1980; Van Esch, Rik, and Van Zuydam, 2016). In security studies, where public access is limited, cognitive mapping has mostly been applied to politicians, whose thought processes are documented by speeches, records of meetings, or war games (Bonham and Shapiro in Axelrod 1976; Bonham, Shapiro, Trumble 1979; Johnston 1995; Klein and Cooper 1982; Levi and Tetlock 1980; Olsson 2019; Schafer and Walker 2006).…”

Narrative incongruence in pandemic local governance: Mayors perform responsibility as communities demand responsiveness

“…The concept we use originates from a study on whether Dutch political leaders were responsive to their followers. Narrative congruence was operationalized as the amount of overlap in the cognitive maps of both groups (van Esch, Joosen, & van Zuydam, 2016). The data corpus utilized two text sources, leaders' speeches and partisan followers' responses on a survey.…”