Representation in Western Europe: Connecting party-voter congruence and party goals
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148119873102 |
| Published date | 01 February 2020 |
| Date | 01 February 2020 |
| Author | Annika Werner |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148119873102
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2020, Vol. 22(1) 122 –142
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148119873102
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Representation in Western
Europe: Connecting
party-voter congruence
and party goals
Annika Werner
Abstract
One of the most common critiques of political parties is that they no longer represent the
interests of their voters. On one hand, representation literature tasks all parties equally to ensure
high ideological congruence with their voters. On the other hand, party behaviour literature
acknowledges that parties have legitimately different primary goals, in particular vote-maximisation
or policy-seeking. Thus, this article analyses whether ideological congruence depends on the general
goals that parties pursue. Furthermore, this article proposes a novel, distribution-based measure
of party-voter ideological congruence that reduces the loss of voter information stemming from
the many-to-one data relationship. This measure is applied to 470 data points from parties in 10
Western European countries from 1970 to 2009. The article finds that vote-maximising parties
create higher levels of congruence than policy-seeking parties. On this basis, the article calls for
evaluations of party behaviour considering party-type specificity.
Keywords
congruence, policy-seeking, political parties, representation, vote-maximising, Western Europe
The notions that political parties are central to modern democracies, and that modern
democracy is indeed unthinkable without parties, are rarely disputed. In established
democracies, like those in Western Europe, parties are meant to fulfil important demo-
cratic functions. At the core of these is societal representation, whereby parties are the
prime actors connecting citizens and political decision making (Lawson and Merkl, 1988;
Müller and Meyer, 2010). Whether parties fulfil this function has been called into increas-
ing doubt (Mair, 2006, 2008) while empirical studies of congruence between parties and
voters usually come to positive conclusions (e.g. Belchior, 2010, 2013; Dalton, 1985).
This article contributes to this discussion by focusing on different goals parties might be
School of Politics and International Relations, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia
Corresponding author:
Annika Werner, School of Politics and International Relations, Australian National University, Canberra,
0200 ACT, Australia.
Email: annika.werner@anu.edu.au
873102BPI0010.1177/1369148119873102The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsWerner
research-article2019
Original Article
Werner 123
pursuing, by proposing a new measure for party-voter policy congruence, and by utilising
a new, longitudinal and cross-country data set matching parties and their voters.
Within democratic models that focus on how parties are bound to their voters through
elections, chiefly the Responsible Party Model (RPM), evaluating ideological congruence
between parties and their voters is one of the prime strategies to assess party performance
(Arnold and Franklin, 2012; Belchior, 2013; Golder and Stramski, 2010). On one hand, the
RPM is a theoretical model to analyse how parties and voters might interact in the demo-
cratic representation process. On the other hand, it bears a strong normative component. As
its name implies, only parties behaving in the way the model proposes, including creating
high ideological congruence with their voters, are considered ‘responsible’ (APSA, 1950).
Thus, RPM and theoretical democracy models that rest on similar delegation mechanisms
task all parties to match their voters’ preferences to the same (high) degree.
However, the scholarship on party behaviour has established that parties can have dif-
ferent, equally legitimate goals (Müller and Strøm, 1999). Furthermore, it has been shown
that two of these goals, vote-maximising and policy-seeking, are closely connected to
specific party types, that is mainstream centrist and niche extreme parties, respectively
(Meyer and Wagner, 2013). This article, thus, connects these streams of literature and
assesses whether party types, which can be assumed to have different primary goals, pro-
duce consistently diverging levels of ideological congruence with their voters. The over-
arching hypothesis of this article is that vote-maximising parties create higher ideological
congruence than policy-driven parties.
This article proceeds by connecting the theoretical logics of ideological congruence
and party goals as well as party types. To analyse ideological congruence, a novel distri-
bution-based measure is proposed that aims at preventing the loss of voter information
caused by established measures. To be clear, this new measure is not able to solve all
well-known issues concerning congruence measurement limitations (e.g. scale compara-
bility). Instead, it focuses on advancing the comparison of voter and party positions and
contributes to the existing methods by producing more realistic outcomes than previous
measures. This is shown in the validation section. The distribution-based measure is then
applied to a novel data set combining Manifesto data with a series of cross-country elec-
tion surveys, which allows for the analysis of 470 data points from 85 parties in 10
Western European countries across 92 elections between 1973 and 2009. Finally, the
analysis of this data finds that vote-maximising parties indeed create higher ideological
congruence than vote-seeking parties. Thus, this article argues that to come to valid con-
clusions about evaluations of party behaviour and party representation, models should
take the fundamental distinction of party goals into account.
Representation by parties: The role of ideological
congruence
Modern representative democracy is based on the interaction between parties and voters,
with usually the former bearing the main burden of making the relationship work. However,
there are fundamentally different ways of understanding the underlying mechanism. The
delegate conceptualisation of political representation tasks the representative to carry the
positions of the represented into the decision-making process (Pitkin, 1967: 146; Schedler,
1998). This direction of responsibility can also be found in Jane Mansbridge’s (2003: 516)
‘promissory representation’ that is closely related to the concept of accountability, where
the representative is bound to the represented and punished or rewarded for their faithful
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