Citizen-elite congruence, political allegiances and political support in Europe (w/ Caroline Hahn)
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Abstract: The long-term functioning and viability of democratic systems depend on the ability of political parties and governments to adequately represent citizens’ interests and to be responsive to their policy demands. As previous research has repeatedly highlighted, citizen-elite congruence on various policy issues and dimensions is of crucial importance when it comes to citizens’ political support and satisfaction with the way democracy works. If political parties and governments fail to respond to citizens’ policy demands, the resulting representation gap between the governing elite and citizens will be reflected in lower levels of political support and an increased dissatisfaction on the side of the citizenry. In this paper, we argue that the impact of citizen-elite policy congruence on political support varies across different segments of the population as well as different types of electoral systems. More specifically, at the individual-level we contend that the detrimental effect of a widening representation gap on political support is attenuated for citizens with pre-existing political allegiances to governing parties. At the country-level, we maintain that the impact of citizen-elite congruence on citizens’ political support is stronger in majoritarian than proportional electoral systems. We test these general arguments about a moderating role of political allegiances and type of electoral system with the help of hierarchical regression models using individual-level data from several waves of the ESS and elite-level data from the CHES. In doing so, our paper sheds light on the conditional relevance of citizen-elite policy congruence for citizens’ political support in modern European democracies.