Scholars of representation are increasingly interested in mass–elite congruence—the degree to which the preferences of elected elites mirror those of voters. Yet existing measures of congruence can be misleading because they ignore information in the data, require arbitrary decisions about quantization, and limit researchers to comparing masses and elites on a single dimension. We introduce a new measure of congruence—borrowed from computer science—that addresses all of these problems: the Earth Mover’s Distance (EMD). We demonstrate its conceptual advantages and apply it to two debates in research on mass–elite congruence: ideological congruence in majoritarian and proportional systems and the determinants of congruence across countries in Latin America. We find that improving measurement using the EMD has important implications for inferences regarding both empirical debates. Even beyond studies of congruence, the EMD is a useful and reliable way for political scientists to compare distributions.

In representative democracies, policymakers should reflect the policy preferences of citizens (Manin 1997; Pitkin 1967). Scholars have long assumed that citizens elect representatives whose platforms are closest to their own preferences (e.g., Downs 1957). And models of accountability assume that elites have incentives not to stray too far from the preferences of sanctioning voters (e.g., Ferejohn 1986). But how close are politicians' preferences to those of their constituents? Do they indeed reflect an aggregation of citizens' preferences, or do they prioritize some citizens over others? These questions are not merely empirical curiosities. If policymakers and policies do not reflect the preferences of citizens, a democratic system

Do elected representatives reflect the preferences of the citizens they represent? Recent studies from the U.S. and a number of other democracies have found that legislators tend to represent better the preferences of affluent citizens. But we still know little about how widespread this bias is. To answer this question, we gathered every publicly available survey of elected representatives in the world and matched it with mass survey data. Our dataset consists of 92,000 elite observations and 3.9 million citizen observations spread across 565 country-years, 52 individual countries, and 33 years. Using a variety of methods, we find that around the world, legislators' preferences are consistently more congruent with those of affluent citizens. However, we also find that this inequality varies substantially by issue domain: while the affluent are better represented on economic issues, the poor seem to be over-represented on cultural issues.

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Scholars have discovered remarkable inequalities in who gets represented in electoral democracies. Around the world, the preferences of the rich tend to be better represented than those of the less well-off. In this paper, we use the most comprehensive comparative dataset of unequal representation available to answer why the poor are underrepresented. By leveraging variation over time and across countries, we study which factors explain why representation is more unequal in some places than in others. We compile a number of covariates examined in previous studies and use machine learning to describe which mechanisms best explain the data. Globally, we find that economic conditions and good governance are most important in determining the extent of unequal representation, and we find little support for hypotheses related to political institutions, interest groups or political behaviour, such as turnout. These results provide the first broadly comparative explanations for unequal representation.