Explanatory factors of ideological congruence between elites, citizens and government programmes. The cases of Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico.

Congruence, as a measure of political representation, allows us to examine the degree to which the representatives' preferences reflect the citizens' preferences (España-Nájera and Martínez Rosón, 2020). It assumes that political parties and citizens manifest linkages, which are expressed in the degree of coincidence on different political, or ideological issues (Huber & Powell, 1994; Thomassen, 1999; Powell, 2011). When the distribution of public preferences corresponds to the distribution of elite views, citizenship as a collective is well represented by elites as a collective (Dalton, 1985: 275). Studies on Latin America that have been carried out along these lines are multiple. They point out that there are systems or parties that present better levels of congruence between parties and their voters both in ideological terms (Luna & Zechmeister, 2005; Siavelis, 2009; Trak and Došek, 2012; Otero Felipe and Rodríguez-Zepeda, 2010 and 2014; Morales, 2014; Lupu, et al, 2017; España-Nájera and Martínez Rosón, 2020), as in terms of themes or issues, more recently (Rodríguez-Zepeda, 2017; Herrera and Morales, 2018; España-Nájera and Martínez Rosón, 2020). However, the analysis has focused on the comparison between elite and citizen surveys and has not considered the role of government programmes as an element for measuring and understanding policy congruence (Lehmann and Schultze, 2012; Werner, 2019). Sendra et al. (2020) describe ideological congruence at three levels - citizenship, elite and programmes - finding that programmes play an important role in representative linkage in at least half of the political parties analyzed. In most cases, programmes tend to be located to the left, compared to the positions of representatives and voters. Moreover, most of the party systems have a variable trajectory of congruence over time, although some relatively constant trends emerge. However, ideological proximity is greater in relation to political elites than to the citizenry. On the other hand, there are only a few parties whose electoral programmes are ideologically closer to voters' positions. This finding represents a contribution, in terms of incorporating electoral programmes as a proxy level for measuring congruence. The aim of this paper is to determine the factors that explain the variation in the levels of ideological congruence between citizens, legislators and government programmes of political parties in four countries: Mexico, Chile, Argentina and Brazil, using the LAPOP, PELA and MARPOR databases. The period of analysis is taken from 2008 to 2018, which allows us to track temporal changes in congruence. The literature on elite-citizen congruence agrees that countries with high levels of economic development, more stable democracies, more institutionalized party systems and the presence of a strong left are predictors of a high level of ideological and programmatic congruence (Luna & Zechmeister, 2005). However, it is worth asking whether the preponderance of these factors is maintained by incorporating electoral programmes as a third element of the representative link.