This paper investigates the ideological congruence between local party representatives and voters in The Netherlands, examining to what extent mainstream and niche parties represent their voters on different dimensions and issues. It is hypothesized that niche parties represent the positions of their voters better than mainstream parties, because of their specific issue profiles.
Using two surveys, one among Dutch voters (the 2010 Dutch Parliamentary Election Study) and one among local party representatives (conducted by ourselves and completed by a representative sample of 796 local councillors), the distributions of the positions of the representatives are compared to the positions of their electorates (many-to-many congruence).
The paper finds that the local councillors represent the Dutch electorate well. Individual parties perform significantly worse and considerable differences between parties can be observed. Contrary to expectations, mainstream parties represent their voters better than niche parties, because of the extreme position-taking of niche party representatives.
