Issue Salience and Congruence Between Voters and Parties in The Netherlands

Political parties play a major role in the process of democratic representation. But parties face complex and often conflicting incentives when it comes to the formation of their policy positions: they have to balance being responsive to their own supporters, accommodating powerful interest groups, staying true to their ideology, and not drifting too far away from the median voter in society. We hypothesize that the extent to which parties are congruent with the preferences of their supporters on particular policy issues depends on the issue salience profile of the party. Analyzing the expressed positions of more than 25 thousand individuals and 10 parties on 30 policy issues in The Netherlands, we find considerable support for this conjecture. For parties that distribute their attention relatively equally across many policy issues, congruence does not vary across issues. But parties that focus on a small number of issues (niche parties) are more congruent than average on the salient issues and less congruent than average on the remaining ones. In sum, niche parties might represent closely the preferences of their voters, but then only for the few issues they own.