Exploring representation from citizens’ perspective: Towards a typology of congruence on the micro-level

Recently, 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 congruence was established by Miller and Stokes (1963) who measured policy-congruence between US-Congressmen and their constituencies and was adapted in a plethora of studies, mostly applying the left-right-scale instead of policy-positions. In the last decade the impact of electoral systems on congruence was the most relevant topic (e.g. Huber and Powell 1994; Powell 2006; Budge and McDonald 2007; Golder and Stramski 2010), whereas parties become more relevant instead of MPs. Recently, scholars consider party system features (e.g. Rohrschneider and Whitefield 2012; Powell 2013) and the applied methods become more sophisticated (Blais and Bodet 2006; Golder and Stramski 2010). Meanwhile, scholars of representation widely neglected the perspective of citizens (Rohrschneider 2005; Leston-Bandeira 2012) even though their relevance is uncontroversial as their perceptions of representation are a crucial characteristic of democratic governance (Dahl, 1971). Only recently, studies that explore their perceptions or demands re-enter the field (Whitefield 2006; Bengtsson 2011; Carman 2011; Dageförde 2013; Gabriel 2015). This article aims at combining both perspectives: It develops new measures of congruence from the perspective of voters on the micro-level and thus changes the common angle from objective measures to an individual perspective; the one of citizens. In doing so, it refers to the current methodological discussion and considers institutional features as party-system features, party competition or the strength of parties in parliament. With the latter, it recognizes (potential) salience of positions in the assembly. Finally the paper investigates positional congruence between citizens and parliamentary parties in Europe from the individual perspective empirically. Hence, it provides information about the evaluation of representation as made by the citizenry and contrasts these findings with the thesis of a current “crisis of representation”. 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.