Policy Congruence and American State Elites: Descriptive Representation versus Electoral Accountability

A concern with the representativeness of political regimes leads us to examine the relative merits of the theses of descriptive representation and accountability. To do so the degree of policy congruence between national samples of the mass public and three elite groups (county political party leaders, state legislators, state bureaucrats) on ten non-fiscal issues is analyzed. The analyses find more support for the latter rather than the former thesis, with legislators being the most representative, followed by county political party leaders for Democrats and bureaucrats for Republicans. These findings have implications for understanding the functions that elites perform, how well they perform them, and to what extent public policy is affected by the learning of accountability by elites rather than increases in descriptive representation.