The Impact of Policy and Process Congruence on Satisfaction with Democracy

From a normative standpoint, representation has long been understood to be a dynamic interaction between elected representatives and citizens. However, the relationship has been presented almost exclusively from the perspective of the representatives; by contrast, few studies have addressed what the public thinks about political representation and what citizens expect from their representatives. (Dis)satisfaction with democracy, recent studies argue, is as much affected by their preferences with regard to the representative process as by their policy preferences. However, the assumption that the gap between citizen and elite preferences fuels dissatisfaction with democracy is largely untested. More specifically, we do not know (1) whether process congruence matters; (2) how policy and process congruence are interrelated; and (3) which has the greatest effect. We combine data on the part of voters from the 2014 Election Study and data on the part of candidates from the 2014 Candidate Study in Belgium to address these questions.