Exploring Congruence in Europe: A Comparative Approach

Political representation between policy makers and the electorate is a fundamental function of any representative democracy. Therefore, the so-called congruence between voters’ and candidates’ policy position is a key element of political representation. However, congruence is an evolving political phenomenon, which changes over the years and differs among countries. This paper intends to study the performance of democratic representation in Europe in terms of ideological congruence between the demand and supply side across time and countries, adding to comparative research on congruence and political representation. We explore congruence on the left/right dimension of political competitiveness and we investigate factors that could have an impact on the level of congruence between the mass public and the political elites: i) the party system characteristics (eg the effective number of parties); ii)the party system polarization; iii) the party size; iv) the electoral institutions; v) the parties’ ideological and electoral profile; and vi) the demographic characteristics of the voters. In the past congruence was typically studied by comparing the attitudes of voters with what opinion polls or panels of experts considered to be the attitudes of politicians or the positions of parties. In 2010, Golder and Stramski introduced a many-to-many approach, and then many recent studies have followed this approach. Relying on the data of Comparative Candidates Survey (CCS), in line with Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) we study congruence between the voters’ and candidates’ policy position across countries and time. The analysis consists of all countries which have participated both in the CCS (rounds I and II) and CSES project (modules 3 and 4).