Does context matter? Party systems and congruence on distinct issue-dimensions

The principle of representation is organizing principle of modern large-scale democracies but faces to be criticized as the ongoing critical discourse about a presumed “crisis of representation” indicates. The concept of congruence is applied continuously as a means for evaluating representation, whereas the implicit assumption is: The higher the congruence between political actors and the electorate, the better representation works. The initial design of these studies was established by Miller and Stokes (1963) who measured policy-congruence between US-Congressmen and their constituencies. In the aftermath, the impact of electoral systems on congruence was the most relevant topic. On the contrary to the initial design, studies that investigate the interrelation of the institutional context and congruence mainly refer to measures of ideological congruence (e.g. Budge and McDonald 2007; Huber and Powell 1994; Powell 2006; Golder and Stramski 2010; Rohrschneider and Whitefield 2012). However, recently there are profound changes in the research field of congruence. On the one hand, the relevance of political parties and party systems is more and more pronounced (e.g. Powell 2013). On the other hand, scholars debate and emphasize the need for considering distinct issue-dimensions in addition to the ideological dimension and investigate the interrelation (e.g. de Vries and Hobolt, 2012, De Vries and Marks, 2012, Rovny, 2013). This paper builds upon these shifts and explores (1) congruence on distinct dimensions (ideology, issues), (2) the relation between the institutional context and congruence (elect party systems) and (3) whether this relation differs on distinct issue-dimensions and ideology. The analysis is conducted for the EU-countries. It combines survey-data (EES 2014) and data on parliamentary parties (ParlGov); both serve as sources for a new dataset.