Whom do you serve? A comparative analysis of ideological congruence between voters, economic elites, and representatives in Southern European political systems (2007 - 2016)

Ideological congruence between citizens and elected officials has been a focal point of representative democracy. In the last decades, however, changes in attitudes and salience within the political spheres in Europe deeply impacted the alignment between voters and representatives on a whole plethora of issues. In this sense, the existing literature on unequal representation shows how representatives’ preferences could in fact be regarded as closer to the preferences of specific social groups rather than the parties’ median supporter or to the electorate at-large. But while the role of socio-economic status has been explored mostly in the United States, only a relatively limited number of studies touched on the (mis)alignment between high income groups, political elite, and the general electorate in Europe. Moreover, the aforementioned studies mostly focused on high-income voters rather than economic elites, covered a single country, and/or analysed a relatively narrow time period. In this sense, we aim to contribute to the present literature by exploring the ideological congruence between representatives, voters, and economic elites in a group of Southern European countries across different time periods. By emphasising the importance of economic factors within the political sphere of different national political systems, we intend to confirm or refute the notion that elected officials at the (supra)national level are closer to economic elites when compared to the public, as well as observing how these trends changed over time. In particular, we posit that economic elites experience a higher congruence than voters when it comes to the level of closeness to elected officials. Moreover, we hypothesise that different parties (e.g., challenger vs. government parties, populist vs. non-populist parties) exhibit different trends in ideological congruence before and after the 2008 Great Recession, with some political formations progressively reducing their gap with the public and/or the economic elite and vice versa. To test our hypotheses, we rely on data from three mass-elite survey projects (IntUne, ENEc, and EUENGAGE) covering various European countries in five different time periods (2007, 2009, 2014, 2016, and 2017). Specifically, we set our focus on the Southern European countries that are consistently included in the selected surveys – Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain – so as to focus on the part of the Eurozone that was most hit by the crisis. The surveys include, amongst the others, questions concerning different political issues that allow us to assess the overall mass-elite congruence on topics like EU integration, economic policy, migration policy, and so on. Our findings seek to shed light on the closeness of political and economic elites when compared to voters, and the role that the crisis played in widening the gap between voters and representatives’ preferences. Additionally, our analysis informs us about variations in ideological congruence between populist and non-populist parties, with the former performing better in terms of mass-elite congruence and the latter in terms of political-economic-elite congruence. Finally, we explore how the levels of ideological congruence between political and economic elites are influenced by the presence of given parties in government