The Representative Deficit Across Different Party Systems

This paper explores the extent to which different party systems in Europe effectively represent their citizens. We argue that many countries in Europe suffer from a "representative deficit", which occurs when a significant portion of citizens have to vote for a politician whose stated views are actually quite different from their own, if they are to vote at all. We measure the extent of this deficit in different European countries using data from the EU Profiler and euandi, two voting advice applications which collectively served around a million people during the European Parliament elections in 2009 and 2014. We find wide variation in the extent to which politicians are accurately tuned in to the preferences of their voters, a variation which is not clearly linked to obvious factors such as the number of political parties.