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ut are considered to be revealed by their party preference: all voters for a party are
assumed to agree with that party’s manifesto. Obviously, such a strategy biases the
results in the direction of high congruence. The preferences of representatives are
sometimes measured through content analysis of election manifestos, unrealistically
assuming that all representatives belonging to a party agree with all proposals
in that party’s manifesto. As most of such studies in the manifesto approach count
words or sentences devoted to particular policy areas, they measure a party’s issue
saliency rather than a party’s issue position. A lively debate has ensued over the
question whether policy positions can be derived from saliency measures (see e.g.
Laver 2001). Alternatively, some studies employ expert surveys to measure the policy
positions of the various political parties (also assuming that there is no variation
among representatives of a party). One of the risks here is that the local experts use
their knowledge of a party’s voters’ ideological preferences as one of the ingredients
to estimate that party’s position, also biasing the results towards high congruence.
This bias is even greater in a third type of study, which measures the representative’s
(or more often: her party’s) position on the basis of the voters’ perception of
that position: it is likely that this perception is not independent of the voter’s own
position. Finally, a fourth type of study measures representatives’ positions in the
same way as voters’ positions are measured: by asking the representatives directly, in
a survey, using Left-Right and/or issue scales. Such studies, however, are relatively
rare.
A second controversial choice is the proper identification of ‘the representative.’
Some classic American studies compared the individual representative with the
voters in his or her constituency (Miller and Stokes 1963). Many European studies
compare the national electorate with the governing party or the governing coalition.
In the latter case the coalition’s position is usually assumed to be the average
of the governing parties’ positions (however these are measured), weighted by their
size in terms of ministerial posts or parliamentary seats. The problem with these
two strategies is that they look at particular actors (the individual Congressman,
the government). Pitkin (1967: 216-225) has argued that representation should not
be seen as an activity of individual actors, but rather as a systemic property that
results from all actors’ behavior. In that perspective, we should not try to measure
congruence between voters and particular representatives or parties, but between
the electorate as a whole and parliament as a whole. Studies of such ‘collective’ as
opposed to ‘dyadic’ representation are also relatively rare (e.g. Weissberg 1978).
A third problem is that ‘the’ electorate (or even ‘the’ constituency) and ‘the’ parliament,
or government, or party are not unitary actors. They consist of many individual
voters or representatives who usually express a variety of preferences. The
solution is often to reduce this variety by comparing central tendencies (the mean,
or the median). The ultimate reductionism is to assess policy congruence by way of
comparing the position of the median voter with the position of the median legislator.
For some (but not all) purposes it may make sense to use a measure of central
tendency at the level of the political elites (Pierce 1999: 14). The government, for
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