“I’ll Get it My Way”. Issue Incongruence and Citizens’ Demand for Alternative Participatory Processes.

Over the last decades, there has been a growing disconnect between citizens and politics (Van Biezen, Mair, & Poguntke, 2012). One aspect of this gap concerns issue incongruence between parties and voters – that is, the extent to which there is a mismatch between the issue positions of voters and their preferred party or the party system at large. Voters whose preference mismatch those of the party they vote for are less likely to see their preferences enacted in policy. Consequently, issue incongruence is often considered problematic, as it suggests that such citizens are underrepresented in the political system. However, incongruence may well lead citizens to seek out alternative ways to get see policy preferences represented, such as through referenda and citizen forums. To this end, this paper theorizes and empirically assesses whether issue incongruence drives citizens’ demand for such participatory processes. Our argument builds on work examining the instrumental considerations underlying citizens’ process preferences (Landwehr & Harms, 2019; Werner, 2019). These studies suggest that citizens prefer procedural arrangements that give them the policies that coincide with their own preferences. For example, Hakhverdian & Schakel (2019) demonstrate that Dutch left-nationalist voters who have no viable option within the party system tend to be more supportive of referendums, indicating that this part of the electorate seeks alternative means to influence policy. Consequently, we posit that incongruent voters will express greater support for alternative participatory processes such as referenda and participatory budgeting. In connecting extant work on issue (in)congruence to alternative participatory processes, our paper adds to both strands of literature. With regards to issue incongruence, our work suggests that citizens who have little to no option of having their preferences represented through the party system may pursue alternative routes of representation. Moreover, we add to the literature on democratic innovations by demonstrating which citizens are more likely to favor alternative forms of participation, namely those citizens which face an uphill battle in seeing their preferences represented in parliament. We evaluate our theoretical propositions using novel survey data gathered in the context of the 2019 Belgian general elections (N=1,797), which provides detailed evidence with regards to both citizens’ incongruence and preferences for alternative participatory processes. We measure incongruence through a fine-grained comparison of party and voter positions on 17 specific policy proposals. Further, we measure support for four alternative participatory processes (binding and advisory referenda, citizen forums and participatory budgeting). Preliminary results demonstrate that, in line with our expectations, issue incongruence drives preferences for alternative decision-making processes. Moreover, this link is stronger for binding instruments compared to advisory ones, suggesting that incongruent voters are more keen to support participatory processes that are more likely to yield tangible returns.