Ideological congruence and electoral institutions

Abstract

A growing consensus has emerged that proportional democracies produce more ideological congruence be-tween their citizens and representatives than majoritarian democracies. But is this consensus open to ques-tion? We argue that it is. As we demonstrate, empirical results regarding ideological congruence are likely to depend on exactly how scholars conceptualize and measure it. In addition to clarifying various aspects of how scholars currently conceptualize ideological congruence, we introduce a new conceptualization and measure of congruence that captures a long tradition in democratic theory emphasizing the ideal of having a legislature that accurately reflects the preferences of the citizenry as a whole. Our new measure is the direct counterpart for ideological congruence of the vote-seat disproportionality measures so heavily used in comparative studies of representation. Using particularly appropriate data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, we find that governments in proportional democracies are not substantively more congru-ent than those in majoritarian democracies. Proportional democracies are, however, characterized by more representative legislatures. Our analysis has important implications for both comparative and American scholars interested in political representation