Abstract
Citizen-elite congruence has long been considered an important yardstick for the quality of democracy. The literature on citizen satisfaction with democracy, however, has reduced congruence almost exclusively to one of its components, policy congruence. Just as citizens are considered to have positions on policy issues, there is growing scholarly interest in the preferences they have about the process of representation. Yet studies inquiring into the impact of the divergent preferences that citizens and elites have regarding the representational process thus far have been few and their results inconclusive. Combining new, unique data from the 2014 Belgian Election and Candidate Studies, we seek to address this lacuna. Our findings indicate that we cannot understand citizen satisfaction without also taking process into account—even as the policy gap has the greater effect. They should be of interest to scholars of democracy, those concerned about citizen disengagement from politics, and political practitioners.
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Notes
Strategic considerations unrelated to policy may lead tactical voters to desert the party they most prefer for another party whose policy positions likely correspond less to their own. For this reason tactical voting introduces noise to the measurement of congruence, biasing the analysis against finding a significant impact of the policy gap on voters’ satisfaction with democracy. In our sample we found 1084 respondents (86 %) to have voted sincerely, supporting the party they rated highest on an eleven-point sympathy scale. Excluding the 179 insincere voters who voted for a different party (for strategic or other reasons), we continue to find very similar results. More details can be found in Online Appendix 6.
We re-examined the policy and process gap on the basis of the party citizens voted for on May 25th. Matching citizen-elite preferences on the basis of actual voting behaviour, we come to equivalent conclusions, confirming the robustness of our findings. The results of this alternative operationalisation are reported in Online Appendix 7.
Lijst Dedecker ran in one district only in the 2014 federal elections, Jean-Marie Dedecker’s home district of West Flanders. As such the party was excluded from the candidate survey and in addition only four survey respondents stated their intention to vote for Lijst Dedecker.
Some have argued that any lack of congruence in itself is inconsequential if the issue is not salient to voters (Giger and Lefkofridi 2014; Walgrave and Lefevere 2013). Re-analysing the data in Online Appendix 8, giving more weight to citizen-elite discrepancies in accordance to the salience of the issue to the individual voter, we find very similar results. As such, using the least complex operationalisation here appears justified.
In their seminal study, Cain et al. (1987) provide evidence of a relationship between member activities and their reputations among constituents, further impacting how voters rate their job performance and, ultimately, their vote. André and Depauw (2016) equally found differences in local party branches’ levels of activity to translate into gains and losses at the polls. Taken together, these results suggest that partisan differences in behaviour impact voters’ attitudes and decisions.
Because the dilemmas regarding the process of representation—but also voters’ economic situation—were included only in the second wave of the election study, they are subject to greater attrition. Certainly, non-response on the process variable is not in any way related to the dependent variable, satisfaction with democracy (b. −0.180; s.e. 0.137). Using multiple imputation to obtain best estimations of the non-observed variables (see Online Appendix 9), moreover, we find very similar effects of the process gap. As such we can be confident that our results are not driven by patterns of non-response.
Replication data and code for all of the analyses presented in this manuscript are available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/EDEJND.
Because the bottom-up deficit ties in with the common criticism levelled at politicians for being out of touch, it could be argued the relationship is asymmetrical. However, the top-down deficit also resonates with public resentment directed at politicians for being too parochial or pandering. As it turns out, we find no difference between the two in our sample when it comes to satisfaction with democracy (b. −0.111; s.e. 0.189). Moreover, adding a multiplicative interaction term, we find it to be negative but not significantly different from zero (see Online Appendix 10). As such, relative to individuals with a top-down deficit, individuals whose views on the representative process are considerably more bottom-up than those of their preferred party are not significantly less satisfied with democracy. The impact of the process gap is not conditional on its direction.
If voting were not compulsory, about 30 % of our respondents indicated they would never or at most only occasionally vote. We can use this information to shed some light on the question as to the conditional effect of compulsory voting. Even though the impact of the process gap is somewhat stronger among non-voters, the multiplicative interaction term is not significant, indicating that the difference between voters and non-voters is not discernible from zero. Details of the additional analysis can be found in Online Appendix 11.
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Acknowledgments
The data used in this publication were collected by the PARTIREP project, funded by the Belgian Federal Science Policy (BELSPO—Grant No. P6/37). The dataset can be obtained from www.partirep.eu. The authors would like to thank Lars Vogel and Thomas Zittel for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Audrey André further acknowledges F.R.S.-FNRS for financial support.
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An erratum to this article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11109-016-9369-1.
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André, A., Depauw, S. The Quality of Representation and Satisfaction with Democracy: The Consequences of Citizen-Elite Policy and Process Congruence. Polit Behav 39, 377–397 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-016-9360-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-016-9360-x