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Figure 3.2 Collective policy congruence on Left-Right scale and political distrust,
1971-2006
100
80
60
40
20
0
1971-'72 1977-'79 1989-'90 1998-'01 2006-'06
Sources: DPS and DPES
fluctuate but show no trend. The percentage agreeing that politicians promise too
much is even going up. Purists might argue that some of these items measure lack
of efficacy rather than lack of trust, but if these data can serve as indicators of political
legitimacy, it would seem that the spectacular rise of policy congruence had no
impact on legitimacy.
This is puzzling because policy congruence is regarded as the criterion for good
representation. One might argue that the Left-Right scale that I used is not an
appropriate instrument to measure policy congruence. This criticism would affect
most congruence studies, but it might be that ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are so devoid of any
substantive meaning, that congruence on this scale is also meaningless. If this were
the case, we would find much less policy congruence when we look at specific issues.
For a number of issues we can compare the positions on 7-point scales of both
MPs and voters, just as we did with the Left-Right scale. We compared the distributions
and calculated the amount of overlap between these distributions, the common
area under the curve. The issue of income differences (should be smaller/same
or greater) is a Left-Right scale, but one with a specific socio-economic content.
Thomassen has argued that elections only provide parties with a policy mandate if
all issues fall on a single Left-Right dimension (Thomassen 1994). This would allow
voters to correctly estimate a party’s position on issues for which they have no information
on the party position, and it would allow parties (and MPs) to correctly estimate
their voters’ positions on all kinds of issues. Thus, we might hypothesize that
policy congruence is easiest to achieve for issues that correlate with the Left-Right
dimension (called ‘structural issues’ by Thomassen 1999), such as income equality.
AndeWeg / 50
MP-voter congruence
politicians promise too much
parties want only my vote
people like me have no
influence
MPs are not interested in
people like me