Candidates-Voters’ Substantive Policy Congruence in Luxembourg

Do politicians systematically misperceive the preferences of their voters? This potential source for the widely debated crisis of representation has so far been understudied despite its increasing relevance in times of populist parties’ and leaders’ rise. We argue that congruence between political parties/elites and voters needs to be measured on specific policy issues rather than on an abstract, encompassing left-right dimension. Our data comes from three complementary research projects at the occasion of the October 2018 Luxembourg elections. On the political elites’ side we rely on; 1) the candidates’ own responses and the official party answers to 15 policy statements contained in the smartwielen Voting Advice Application; 2) the perception by candidates of how the electorate of their party, and that of their constituency would position itself on the same issues. We then compare those candidates’ positions and perceived positions of party and constituency electorates with the actual preferences of voters on the same policy issues taken from a post-electoral representative survey. Overall the paper is based on a number of policy issues for which data is seldom available for both elites and voters when analyzing substantive policy congruence, allowing us to tackle the workshop’s first research question. We do so by 1) studying candidates’ perceptions of the distance between their own positions and the perceived positions of their constituency’s electorate, hypothesizing that it varies according to the popularity of the party and the candidate in the constituency; 2) analyzing elites’ bias by measuring the difference between perceived and actual voters’ positions across parties, policy issues and candidates’ characteristics (elected or not, etc.); 3) exploring candidates’ own perception of their level of policy congruence and that of their party with the party’s and the constituency’s electorate, testing a version of May’s law of curvilinear disparity.