Multidimensional Congruence and European Parliament Electoral Performance

Does ideological incongruence hurt parties in elections? Research on the representational relationship between parties and voters suggests that ideological congruence can be beneficial for a party’s electoral prospects. But there are important differences between types of parties and elections that complicate analyses of party-voter congruence. Ideologically extreme parties, for example, could be highly congruent with voters on certain issues but much less close on the general left-right dimension. Further, European Parliament (EP) elections provide voters with the opportunity to cast a “sincere” vote for the party that most closely reflects their preferences without concern for government prospects. Yet these EP elections also allow citizens to potentially vote for a party based on preferences related to European integration or immigration policy. In this paper, we develop and test a set of hypotheses based on a multidimensional conception of party-voter congruence, and examine the electoral consequences of these varying congruence levels in the 2014 EP elections. Consistent with our expectations, we report differences between the costs of incongruence for mainstream and niche parties in EP elections.