Voter-Party Congruence in Europe: A Candidate-Based Analysis

Political representation, understood as ideological or policy congruence between elites and masses, is a dynamic relationship involving politicians and citizens. In many studies of ideological representation, congruence between elites and masses is assessed by measuring the distance (or the correlation) between the average position of party voters and the average position of the members (elected representatives or candidates) of the same party. This is especially true in the European tradition, where the analysis of ideological representation has been inspired by the “responsible party government” model. However, comparing the legislature or the government as a whole with the entire electorate is also a standard practice. More recently, a number of works adopted an individual-based perspective, whereby congruence is measured as the ideological proximity between a voter and the party she or he voted for in the previous general elections. In this developing research program, the study of voter-party congruence from the point of view of individual politicians has received scarce attention. Although an interest for comparing the preferences of individual representatives with those of their electoral constituencies was present in the most classical studies like Miller and Stokes (1963), the topic has never been investigated using massive cross-country data. In an attempt to contribute to fill this gap, this paper analyzes the degree of ideological congruence between party candidates and the voters of their party in Europe. The explanatory factors we consider are measured at the individual (i.e. candidate) level, at the party level and at the country/election level. Our hypotheses are evaluated against data covering a number of European countries. The data used combine voter data drawn from mass surveys with data taken from the Comparative Candidate Survey (module 1 and 2).