Great Minds Think Alike? A Study of Party Members and Leadership Candidates’ Ideological Congruence

Party leaders represent their membership base during elections, parliamentary debates and coalition formation. In many contemporary Western parties, the party leader is now directly elected by party members through internal elections. A central premise behind such inclusive selection procedures is that party members vote for the candidate who offers the best fit with their policy preferences. However, little is known about whether congruence in policy preferences actually determines party members’ vote during internal leadership elections. Are party members indeed looking for a candidate that aligns neatly with their policy preferences? In this paper, we analyze one-to-one congruence between individual party members and the candidate they voted for in a party leadership contest. The analysis is based on original survey data collected among more than 2,500 party members during the 2019 Flemish Christian-democratic party (CD&V) leadership elections in Belgium. This leadership election was an open race between 7 candidates that received considerable media attention. Approaching parties as miniature democracies, we aim to apply existing insights on voting behavior to the context of intra-party democracy. Based on the literature on ideological congruence between voters and parties/representatives, we anticipate that politically sophisticated members with a lower degree of party identification are more likely to vote for candidates with similar substantive issue preferences.