Revisiting the ideological congruence controversy

Abstract

One of the limits of previous studies using respondents’ self‐placements and subjective party placements to examine levels of citizen‐government congruence is that they were limited to the post‐1995 period. This article extends the number of elections where it is possible to examine levels of citizen‐government ideological congruence with a survey‐based approach. In particular, a unique dataset has been collected that combines data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and several national election studies. The results confirm recent studies that show that levels of citizen‐government ideological congruence are similar under majoritarian and proportional representation (PR) systems. Such studies, however, did not provide evidence that congruence is maintained over the course of a government's mandate. This article introduces, therefore, two measures of citizen‐government congruence that address this issue and that may revive the debate about which electoral systems strengthen the citizen‐government connection: citizen‐government congruence at the end of government mandates and change in congruence between elections. The results indicate that governments stay closer to the median citizens between elections under PR systems than under majoritarian systems. It is found, however, that this decrease in congruence in majoritarian systems is not detrimental to the point of observing smaller levels of congruence at the end of government mandates under majoritarian systems than under PR systems.

Why electoral reform might improve representation and why it might make it worse

“…Overall though neither single‐party governments nor coalitions better represent Canadians’ preferences by this criterion. This finding is consistent with recent studies (Blais and Bodet ; Ferland ; Golder and Lloyd ) showing that SMP and PR can produce high congruence.…”

“…Proponents of reform should consider the goal behind changing the electoral system. Neither our results nor comparative studies provide reasons to expect a different electoral system to change the degree of ideological congruence in Canada (Blais and Bodet ; Ferland ; Golder and Lloyd ). Changing the proximity between governments and citizens’ preferences would not affect Canadians’ levels of satisfaction with democracy either.…”

“…However, the results do correspond to those of existing studies comparing representation under different electoral systems. Proportional and non‐proportional systems have equal levels of congruence (Blais and Bodet ; Ferland ; Golder and Lloyd ). Proportional systems are better at representing the preferred parties of a greater proportion of citizens.…”

“…Many of these studies found that proportional systems produce better congruence than non‐proportional systems (McDonald and Budge ; Powell ; Powell and Vanberg ). However, more recent studies show that there is no difference in congruence between proportional and non‐proportional systems (Blais and Bodet ; Golder and Stramski ; Golder and Lloyd ; Ferland ).…”

Civil Society Engagement and Policy Representation in Europe

“…Yet, there are also reasons to believe that majoritarian systems lead to better representation, for instance, because they tend to produce single-party governments with less need to compromise (Wlezien & Soroka, 2012). At this point, the empirical evidence is as inconclusive as the theoretical discussion, and particularly the role of electoral rules in citizen-government congruence on the left-right dimension remains fiercely debated (Blais & Bodet, 2006;Ferland, 2016;Golder & Lloyd, 2014;Powell, 2009). We control for a potential effect of electoral rules on representation by interacting public opinion with a measure of the effective number of parliamentary parties (ENPP), developed by Golder (2005) and later extended by Bormann and Golder (2013;cf.…”