The effect of mass–elite congruence in representational style on citizens’ democratic satisfaction

Abstract

Satisfaction with democracy and confidence in political institutions are often linked to policy or ideological alignment between voters and elected officials. While policy congruence has been widely studied, less attention has been paid to process congruence—the gap between citizens’ preferences for representation and politicians’ perceptions of their duties. This paper uses data from three Portuguese election cycles (2005, 2011, and 2015) to examine how process congruence affects satisfaction with democracy. It also assesses whether political interest and educational attainment moderate this relationship, shaping the extent to which citizens respond to congruence between their own representational preferences and those of political elites. The results indicate that policy congruence is by far the strongest correlate of satisfaction with democracy. By comparison, the independent association of process congruence is small and not statistically robust: once policy and ideological congruence are accounted for, moving across the observed range of process congruence is not reliably related to satisfaction, and the estimates are inconsistent in direction across representative targets (i.e., whether congruence is measured in relation to all MPs, government MPs, or one’s preferred-party MPs). Citizens’ underlying representational preferences are nonetheless related to their satisfaction—those who favour a delegate style tend to be less satisfied than those who favour a trustee style. Contrary to expectations, this relationship is not stronger among the politically interested or the more educated; the limited moderation we detect—by education—runs opposite to expectations. Taken together, these findings caution against treating process congruence as a determinant of democratic satisfaction comparable to policy congruence, while suggesting that how citizens think representation should work is not irrelevant to how they evaluate democracy.