Corresponding expectations and task definitions? Citizens’, MPs’ and non-elected candidates’ perceptions of representation

Many scholars have argued that contemporary representative democracies are suffering from a legitimacy crisis, manifested by citizen disappointment with the dominating structures of representation. Scholars as well as policy-makers have responded this by introducing an array of ways to engage voters in deliberative and participatory forms of democracy. Substantially less attention, however, has been paid to the functioning of existing representational processes and the extent to which voters’ and MPs’ perceptions of representation match. Considering that representation is based on a reciprocal relationship, the representatives’ task as agents should ideally be aligned with the principals’ expectations.

Based on a unique set of elite and voter data, we analyse the level of congruence in Finnish MPs’, non-elected candidates’ and voters’ preferences for the focus of representation, applying the measure of many-to-many measure of congruence introduced by Golder and Stramski. Our analysis concentrates on the focus of representation, further classified as territorial representation (including both national- and constituency-based focus), party representation and functionally defined interest representation. In line with May’s law of curvilinear disparity, we expect that congruence between MPs and voters would be higher than congruence between non-elected candidates and voters. Opposite to our hypothesis, the results show surprisingly high levels of congruence between all three groups. Given that that Finnish open-list PR system contains favourable conditions for several types of representation and thus offers more room for dispersed views, our findings imply that the situation would be at least as good in other contexts.