Policy congruence and its impact on satisfaction with democracy

Abstract

The relationship between what citizens want in terms of policies and what they get from political elites is considered one of the key aspects of representative democracies. Scholars have thus investigated thoroughly the state of citizen-elite congruence in advanced democracies and whether this relationship influences citizens' democratic satisfaction. These studies do show that citizens' assessment of their political system and especially their satisfaction with democracy are importantly influenced by the quality of representation and how close they are to their preferred parties or the government position. In the paper, we build on this literature and consider whether congruence between citizen preferences and policies influences citizens' satisfaction with democracy. This last stage of representation has mostly been overlooked in past research. To address this question, we make use of data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (module 4). Policy congruence is measured based on respondent answers to a series of questions with respect to their preferences on public expenditure in eight policy domains. We also compare the effect of policy congruence to other conventional measures of congruence (e.g. party and government congruence). Our results indicate that this new measure of policy congruence has substantial effect on citizens’ satisfaction with democracy and more so than previous measures of ideological congruence.