What favors the congruence between citizens and their governments? Multi-dimensional ideological congruence and party systems

It is central to the idea of democracy that governments do what citizens want. Therefore, congruence between citizen preferences and government acts is an important indicator of the quality of democracies. Numerous studies have contributed to the “congruence controversy” focusing predominantly on how electoral systems affect median voter congruence on the left-right axis (Blais and Bodet 2006; Golder and Stramski 2010). Our study extends this perspective by taking into account multi-dimensional congruence and assessing how well citizen preferences are represented across multiple issues such as on redistribution, immigration, and European Integration. In explaining the factors that facilitate multi-dimensional congruence between citizens and their governments we focus on both individual characteristics (e.g. voting behavior and ideological stances) and contextual differences (e.g. government composition). We investigate this relation both across time and across countries by combining data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, the European Social Survey and the European Election Study. Preliminary results show that multi-party legislatures achieve better congruence than those with few parties. Citizen-government congruence, on the other hand, is shown to vary considerably across specific issues. The exact dimensionality of the policy space is identified as a core moderator of this relationship.