Measuring the mass-elite preference congruence: findings from a meta-analysis and introduction to the symposium

Abstract

The extensive scholarship devoted to the congruence of mass-elite policy preferences lacks consensus about the meaning, comparison, and measurement across political settings. This makes comparisons difficult and raises obstacles to advancing the debates. This symposium aims to identify the diversity of methodological choices and to reflect systematically on several key choices of particular importance in understanding the congruence. The contributions to the symposium compare and contrast how several types of measurement fare in diverse political contexts in Eastern Europe, Latin America, North Africa, and East Asia, and what we can learn from those methodological choices.

Post-accession congruence in Bulgaria and Romania: measuring mass-elite congruence of opinions on European integration through mixed methods

“…Speech data on the Bulgarian and Romanian elites comes from the public speeches and statements of party leaders, usually reflected in the media or presented on their party websites. Political parties often lie at the core of elite-level preference aggregation (Shim and Gherghina, 2020). These persons combine their party duties with official positions, mainly as leaders of the opposition or prime ministers, which makes them crucial actors within the national elites that determine its overall attitude on a given matter.…”

“…In addition to the challenges outlined in the introduction to this symposium (Shim and Gherghina, 2020), the measurement of mass-elite congruence in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) faces three important challenges. The limitations of existing measurements are described in detail in the following section and can be summarized as follows.…”

Combining deductive and inductive elements to measure party system responsiveness in challenging contexts: an approach with evidence from Latin America

“…In sum, in line with the strategy employed in most empirical approaches, as noted in the introduction to this symposium (Shim and Gherghina, 2020), I propose that we focus on an intermediate level of abstraction when measuring responsiveness (for a similar approach, see Farag, 2020, this issue). This level is more general than that of specific issues that may or may not be salient in a given country, and that for example Luna and Zechmeister (2005) focus on in their seminal article.…”

Likeminded? Congruence Between Political Elites and their Voters Regarding Policy Choices inSwiss‐EURelations

“…More specifically, I investigate to what extent the distribution of opinions among the political elites overlaps with the distribution of opinions among their electorates. Scholars who work on ideological congruence have highlighted the importance of the method researchers use to conceptualise congruence because different methods applied to the same data yield different findings on the existence and size of congruence gaps (for a comprehensive discussion, see Golder & Stramski, 2010;Müller et al, 2012;Shim & Gherghina, 2020). Müller et al (2012) and Shim and Gherghina (2020) urge researchers to pose themselves a set of questions to determine the appropriate congruence measure for their analysis.…”