In Search of Congruence: Different Measurements, Different Results

Congruence between attitudes and preferences of citizens and their democratic representatives constitutes an important indicator of the functioning of democratic representation. A growing body of literature has raised some methodological questions that lead to inconclusive findings on what has an impact on congruence. Our paper focuses on the measurement problem of congruence, which is subsequently related particularly to the effect of different conceptualizations (many-to-one, many-to-many). Using a single INTUNE dataset we demonstrate that even with the same initial data the different measurements bring different values of congruence for individual cases and, additionally, the results show variation in the relationships between the democratic congruence and several institutional and other variables. The analysis thus suggests that the deliberate choice of different conceptualizations and measurement methods leads to the diversity of conclusions on the impact of institutional and other factors on the congruence. A particular concern is also dedicated to the recently introduced conceptualization of congruence as a many to many relationship. So far, little attention was paid to this particular measurement of congruence in the literature. We therefore present different ways of measuring congruence as many-to-many relationship focusing mainly on various options for evaluating the similarity of the distributions of citizens and representative preferences with previously unrecognized important differences between them.