Citizen-elite congruence? Attitudes towards local governance reforms in Switzerland and Germany

Abstract

Substantive representation, i.e. congruence between citizens’ and representatives’ issue positions, has become an important topic in scholarly debates and is seen as a normatively desirable feature of representative democracy. Existing empirical research on substantive representation has mostly focused on the quality of national issue representation and scholars investigated the ideological and issue congruence between party electorates and representatives in national parliaments. For other government levels, however, we have little knowledge about issue congruence between citizens and elites. For example, do citizens differ from their representatives in their assessment of local issues? We contribute to an answer of this question by analyzing on a highly relevant and contentious issue in the local context: metropolitan governance reforms. To do so, we rely on two different survey data sources. For measuring citizen attitudes towards different local governance reforms, we rely on a survey that was conducted for selected metropolitan areas, amongst others in Germany and Switzerland. For the measurement of elite attitudes, we use data from a survey among European mayors in cities with more than 10’000 inhabitants. In general, the results suggest that congruence in attitudes on local governance reforms between citizens and mayors is rather scarce. Living in a particular local context, e.g. a poor suburb, does not seem to affect citizens and elites positions in the same way. More importantly, not even citizens and mayors living in the same municipality are generally more congruent in their views than mayors and citizens living in different municipalities. Nonetheless, we find evidence for a cue-effect from local political elites to local citizens with regard to one particular reform: amalgamation. These findings raise important questions with regard to local democratic representation.