Multidimensional Incongruence and Political Disaffection in Europe

• In Event: It's My Party and I'll Realign If I Want To

Abstract

To what extent do representational gaps between parties and voters destabilize party systems and create electoral opportunities for anti-establishment parties on the left and right? In this paper, we use multiple measures of party-partisan incongruence to evaluate whether issue-level incongruence contributes to an increase of political disaffection and support for anti-establishment politics. Extending earlier work on 2014 data, we use data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) for party positions and public opinion data from the European Election Study (EES) from 2009 to 2019. In short, we find that ideological incongruence matters. Multidimensional incongruence is associated with disaffection at the national and European level, and that disaffected mainstream party voters are in turn more likely to consider voting for anti-establishment challenger parties. This finding suggests that perceived gaps in party-citizen substantive representation have important electoral ramifications across European democracies.

Authors

• Seth Jolly, Syracuse University

• Ryan Bakker, University of Georgia

• Jonathan Polk, Lund University