In the past decades, research on political support has seen an increasing interest in the role of substantive representation. In particular, the impact of congruence between representatives and voters in left-right ideology and policy positions on satisfaction with democracy and other measures of political support and political participation has been analyzed. These studies are based on the notion that citizens should feel better represented when political elites take positions on either ideological or particular issue dimensions close to their own and hence be more satisfied with the way democracy works in their country. Recently, scholars have also taken account of the role of issue salience as an influence on the extent to which position proximity on a certain issue has an impact. What has been ignored, however, is the relevance of congruence between citizens and elites in the importance given to particular issues per se, rather than the positions held on certain issues. Analyses using survey and campaign media content analysis from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) have shown that issue salience congruence indeed affects satisfaction with democracy, in particular among the politically interested. This paper will explore whether this result is generalizable to other advanced democracies, using cross-national data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) and the Manifesto Project. This approach allows not only exploring the extent to which individual-level variables moderate the impact of issue salience congruence on satisfaction with democracy across different countries. By applying multilevel modeling techniques, it will also reveal whether the relationship varies with country-level factors.
