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

Political representation, understood as ideological or policy congruence between elites and masses, has been mainly assessed in two ways. Either by comparing the substantive or ideological average position of the legislature or the government as a whole with the position of entire electorate, or by comparing where the party MPs or candidates stand with the position of their party voters on the same issues or on the left-right continuum. The study of voter-party congruence from the point of view of individual politicians has, however, received scarce attention. This paper intends to fill this gap by analyzing the degree of ideological congruence between party candidates and their party voters in Europe from the point of view of the party representatives, i.e. the party candidates running in the parliamentary elections. Our dependent variable is the distance between the party candidates’ positions on the left-right scale and the average placement of their voters. Our goal is to assess how the ideological congruence varies according to three sets of determinants: the candidates’ characteristics, the parties’ ideological and electoral profile, and the party system characteristics in terms of ideological polarization in a given election. The analysis will focus on the additive effects of these determinants, taking into account the hierarchical nature of the data. In addition, we will tentatively assess how the effects of individual determinants of the ideological congruence vary according to key party characteristics and how the impact of the party characteristics on congruence – such as parties’ anti-EU position and anti-establishment nature – varies according to the degree of polarization in a given election. Empirically, we combine voter data drawn from mass surveys with data taken from the Comparative Candidate Survey.