Does ideological congruence matter? The effect of congruence on system support in liberal democracies

Ideological congruence is an important facet of democratic governance. The closer the match between the preferences of the public and those of elected elites, the better representative democracy is said to function. The bulk of the existing literature is concerned with the measurement of congruence and its treatment as the outcome to be explained. Little attention has been paid to the effects of ideological congruence. This paper analyzes whether ideological congruence increases the probability of citizens being satisfied with the overall functioning of democracy. While congruence is traditionally measured as the distance between the mean citizen and the government, we also include other types of congruence that take the dispersion of the public and the elite into consideration. The theory is tested with CSES data using multilevel methods.