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Great minds think alike? A new measure of MEPs–voters congruence following the 2019 European Parliament elections

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Abstract

Do citizens and Members of the European Parliament agree on the format and future of the EU? While the literature has emphasized the gap between pro-European elites and increasingly Eurosceptic electorates, this article relies on a novel dataset to explore the implications of measures of such (in)congruence at the EU level. We compare the preferences of elected representatives and of voters on a wide range of issues: democracy at the supranational level, the reform of EU policies, as well as institutions. The empirical analysis relies on a citizen survey and on an MEP survey conducted in the framework of the RECONNECT project. We evidence that the level of congruence varies across issues and that it is the representatives, not the citizens, who drive polarization.

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Notes

  1. Note that this assumption empirically resembles the structure of many surveys (including ours) where respondents are asked to position themselves on a close-ended scale (e.g. by showing where they stand on a left–right scale ranging from zero to ten).

  2. It should also be noted that the same mechanism works perfectly if we reduce the political space to a specific range of preferences by ‘zooming’ in on voters of a given party. In other words, representatives of any extreme left (or right) party will not be more aligned with their extreme left (or right) voters by adopting the most extreme left (or right) possible position; on the contrary, they are likely to be less congruent than other party representatives who adopt a position closer to the median party voter. Actually, our expectation is simply the logical extension of Anthony Downs’ hypothesis that parties who want to attract voters tend to adopt the position of the median voter (Downs 1957); reversely, it can be expected that those who do not make such a move are further removed from their voters.

  3. RECONNECT was a four-year (2018-2022) multidisciplinary research project on ‘Reconciling Europe with its Citizens through Democracy and the Rule of Law’. It received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research & Innovation programme under Grant Agreement no. 770142.

  4. The data are not publicly available due to privacy restrictions, but can be obtained upon request to the authors.

  5. While RCC is well fitted to measure the absolute distance between representatives and their voters, it does not indicate in which direction the citizens’ and their representative’s preferences diverge. We therefore complement the RCC measure with the more simple and intuitive median citizen congruence (MCC)—that is the ideological distance between the median position of citizens (MC) and the position of their representative (R). This has the advantage of clarifying the direction of the relationship (MCC = R — MC).

  6. That said, what is true for a one-to-many measurement of congruence, in which the preferences of each (one) MEP are compared to that of his (or her) (many) voters, may produce a different outcome if we would consider how MEPs collectively represent their voters, be it at the party or constituency level. With a many-to-many measurement of congruence, the representatives’ heterogeneous preferences might indeed collectively better match the also heterogeneous preferences of their voters.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Jérémy Dodeigne, Simon Hix, Sylvia Kritzinger, Carolina Plescia, François Rambour, Constantin Schäfer, Oliver Treib, Richard Whitaker and James Wilhelm for their support, comments and encouragements throughout the research process. We extend our gratitude to Giulia Sandri, Felix von Nostitz and François Briatte for their help in preparing and fielding the MEP survey.

Funding

Research for this article has been done in the framework of the RECONNECT project (Reconciling Europe with its Citizens through Democracy and Rule of Law), which received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research & Innovation programme under Grant Agreement no. 770142.

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  1. Université Catholique de Lille (ESPOL), 60 Boulevard Vauban, CS 40109, 59016, Lille Cedex, France

    Camille Kelbel & Marie Neihouser

  2. Université Catholique de Lille (ETHICS EA7446), 60 Boulevard Vauban, CS 40109, 59016, Lille Cedex, France

    Julien Navarro

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Correspondence to Julien Navarro.

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Kelbel, C., Navarro, J. & Neihouser, M. Great minds think alike? A new measure of MEPs–voters congruence following the 2019 European Parliament elections. Eur Polit Sci 22, 476–495 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-023-00434-9

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