Ideological Congruence Beyond Electoral Systems: Responsibility, Responsiveness, and Particularized Electorates

Proximity between voters’ ideological positions and governments’ enacted policies is a major goal of liberal democratic systems. Unsurprisingly, a number of studies have analyzed the congruence between citizens’ and (government) parties on different levels. Treating governments as unitary actors whose policy preferences – and accordingly, the policies enacted, the ideological position taken, and eventually the degree of ideological congruence achieved – are largely determined by the process of electoral competition, election outcomes, and government formation, this literature has largely revolved around the effects of electoral institutions. The “ideological congruence controversy” (Powell 2013) of the recent years has revised theoretical mechanisms linking electoral systems with ideological congruence and provided nuanced explanations for the phenomenon of interest. At the same time, the focus on broadly stable institutional (electoral) factors has created a blind spot relating to the empirical changes that parties – thus governments – and electorates have gone through. Mair (2013), for example, has argued that within the last centuries encompassing changes regarding the link between voters and parties, as well as increased demands for parties in government to act according to external expectations, have narrowed down parties’ capability to be responsive to voters’ preferences. The ideological congruence controversy has failed to notice that the central actors of its theory have dramatically changed. Existing explanations of levels of ideological congruence are thus critically flawed. In order to overcome this deficient state of the art, this paper sets out to integrate arguments regarding governments’ increased difficulty to fulfill both, democracy’s demands for responsiveness on the one hand and for responsibility on the other (Mair 2013), into explanations of ideological congruence between governments and voters. It argues that governments’ reduced capability “to listen to voters and to understand, aggregate or process their demands” (Mair 2013, 153) as well as their waning room for maneuver due to demands of responsibility, need to be incorporated into theoretical explanations of ideological congruence. It queries how party organizational characteristics (membership), individualizing electorates, and increased demands of responsibility (globalization, Europeanization, and legacies of the past) affect the level of ideological congruence between voters and parties in 12 established Western European democracies in the post-war period. The paper finds that individualized electorates and demands for governments to act responsible with regard to inherited policies negatively affect ideological congruence. Processes of party organizational change, globalization, and European integration on the other hand do not influence ideological congruence significantly and unambiguously. Regarding the effects of electoral rules, the paper presents evidence that is in favor of their operation. It thus contributes to the genuine ideological congruence controversy and adds important theoretical arguments that help us understand the ideological proximity between parties and voters. Mair, P. (2013). Smaghi versus the Parties: Representative Government and Institutional Constraints. In A. Schäfer & W. Streeck (Eds.), Politics in the Age of Austerity (pp. 143–168). Cambridge, UK: Polity. Powell, G. B. (2013). Representation in Context: Election Laws and Ideological Congruence Between Citizens and Governments. Perspectives on Politics, 11(01), 9–21.