This paper considers how issue salience environments affect long-term patterns of political choice via processes of political socialization. Drawing on the well-known ‘impressionable years’ hypothesis, we theorize that voters who grew up in high-immigration salience contexts subsequently exhibit higher levels of voter-party agreement on immigration (issue congruence). We find support for this hypothesis from two studies, which leverage cross-sectional variation within cohorts in exposure to immigration salience in voters’ formative years. The first employs congruence data from a survey of 10 European countries, linked to historical salience data from the Comparative Manifesto Project. The second is a within-country study, measuring salience and congruence from two long-running German public opinion survey series. The analysis suggests that growing up at times when immigration is high on the political agenda can have long-term consequences for the relationship between voters’ preferences on that issue and their political choices, shedding light on the mechanism behind ‘generational realignment’.

In recent years, scholars have observed that political parties’ policy positions frequently fit the preferences of well‐to‐do voters better than those of the less well‐to‐do; a phenomenon known as policy congruence inequality. While the existence of inequality in policy congruence is well‐established, we currently only have a modest understanding of the causes of it. We develop an argument proposing that the political mobilisation of citizens with low socioeconomic status (SES) both in the parliamentary channel, in the form of high turnout, and in the extra‐parliamentary channel, in the form of high union density, is pivotal. Both high turnout and union density force parties to pay more attention to the preferences of the disadvantaged, thereby creating lower policy congruence inequality. To test the argument, we have collected and harmonised election surveys and party manifestos covering 90 elections in Australia, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, covering several decades until today, yielding more than 120,000 voter–party dyads. Employing this new dataset, our results confirm that the political mobilisation of citizens with low SES is a strong predictor of policy congruence inequality. This finding nuances the conclusion of extant research by showing that low‐SES citizens are not always on the losing side politically. It also implies the important role of maintaining or maybe even increasing turnout and union membership among the disadvantaged in society. Places where either turnout or union density is slipping in these years are likely to witness further increases in policy congruence inequality in the years to come.

The relevance of the macro‐context for understanding political trust has been widely studied in recent decades, with increasing attention paid to micro–macro level interactive relationships. Most of these studies rely on theorising about evaluation based on the quality of representation, stressing that more‐educated citizens are most trusting of politics in countries with the least corrupt public domains. In our internationally comparative study, we add to the micro–macro interactive approach by theorising and testing an additional way in which the national context is associated with individual‐level political trust, namely evaluation based on substantive representation. The relevance of both types of evaluation is tested by modelling not only macro‐level corruption but also context indicators of the ideological stances of the governing cabinet (i.e., the level of its economic egalitarianism and cultural liberalism), and interacting these with individual‐level education, economic egalitarianism and cultural liberalism, respectively. As we measure context characteristics separately from people's ideological preferences, we are able to dissect how the macro‐context relates to the levels of political trust of different subgroups differently. Data from three waves (2006, 2010, 2014) of the European Social Survey (68,294 respondents in 24 European countries and 62 country‐year combinations), enriched with country‐level data derived from various sources, including the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, are used in the multi‐level regression analyses employed to test our hypotheses. We found support for the micro–macro level interactions theorised by the evaluation based on the quality of representation approach (with higher levels of trust among more‐educated citizens in less corrupt countries), as well as for evaluation based on substantive representation in relation to cultural issues (with higher levels of trust among more culturally liberal citizens in countries with more culturally liberal governing cabinets). Our findings indicate that the latter approach is at least equally relevant as the approach conventionally used to explain context differences in political trust. Finally, we conclude our study with a discussion of our findings and avenues for future research.

The level of congruence between parties and their voters can vary greatly from one policy issue to another, which raises questions regarding the effectiveness of political representation. We seek to explain variation in party–voter congruence across issues and parties. We focus on the hypotheses that (1) average proximity between the positions of voters and the party they vote for will be highest on the issues that the party emphasises in the election campaign and that (2) this relationship will be stronger for niche parties. We test these hypotheses using data on the policy preferences of voters, party positions, party attention profiles and salience on concrete policy issues in four countries: The Netherlands, Ireland, Germany and Sweden. Overall, we find that voter–party proximity tends to be higher on issues that the party emphasises. As these are the issues where parties typically have the greatest policy impact, this implies that the quality of representation is highest where it matters most. There is some limited evidence that the positive relationship between issue salience and proximity is stronger for niche parties. In sum, the quality of policy representation varies strongly with party‐level issue salience and to a lesser extent with the type of political party.

Political representation does not function well for citizens whose positions on political issues differ from those of elected representatives. In this paper, we argue that opinion incongruence leads citizens to want to bypass elected representatives and place more decision‐making power in the hands of the public. We theorise that this is because incongruent citizens are highly dissatisfied with the existing political system and/or think they will benefit from direct decision‐making in terms of improved policy responsiveness. Using data from the 2019 Belgian Election Survey (n = 3413) and Party Leadership Survey, we find that greater incongruence between citizens’ positions and those of their elected representatives is related to higher support for direct decision‐making. This holds for opinion incongruence with the party voted for and incongruence with Parliament as a whole. This paper contributes novel insights into the consequences of the quality of political representation as well as the drivers of citizens’ support for direct decision‐making processes.

In the first comparative study of multidimensional government‐citizen policy congruence, this article shows that citizens are less satisfied with democracy when their views differ from that of the government on policy dimensions beyond the general left‐right axis. Satisfaction is reduced by a government that deviates on European integration and redistribution and partly also on social lifestyle, immigration and environmental protection. Furthermore, this analysis identifies the level of political interest as central moderator of this relationship. Satisfaction of citizens with stronger interest in politics suffers more when there is a politically distant government. Combining data from the 2010 Chapel Hill Expert Survey and two waves of the European Social Survey, the analysis builds on information on citizen‐government policy congruence of some 45,000 citizens and 31 governments in 15 Western and Central Eastern European countries. The article brings a multidimensional perspective to the study of policy congruence between citizens and governments in a time when the preference structure of parties and citizens has become increasingly complex.

How much autonomy elected representatives should have in looking after the interests of their constituents is a central question of democratic theory. While much research has been conducted on the representational roles adopted by elected representatives, we currently lack an understanding of citizens’ preferences for contrasting models of representation, more specifically whether they believe representatives should primarily act as instructed delegates, closely following public opinion or rather as trustees, relying on their own convictions and judgement. As a result, we know relatively little about how congruent citizens’ and politicians’ representational preferences are, whether some subgroups of citizens and politicians are more congruent with each other than others and whether citizens’ and politicians’ representational preferences are driven by the same determinants. Using data from 13 countries, we assess the level of congruence between voters’ and MPs’ preferences in representational style. In all countries, citizens favouring delegate‐style MPs are poorly represented as the vast majority of representatives display a moderate to strong preference for trusteeship. Analysing subgroups of politicians and citizens according to party family, ideology, inclusion in government, populism and social class reveals that MPs from left‐wing or right‐wing radical and populist parties, representatives sitting on the opposition benches and those belonging to lower classes tend to hold representational preferences that are more in line with the preferences of their own supporters or individuals belonging to the same group as themselves, but also with those of the entire electorate. However, even among these politicians there are few delegates. Examining whether citizens’ and politicians’ representational preferences are driven by similar determinants, we assessed the influence of their ideological orientations, socioeconomic status and support for (or affiliation with) a party in government on their representational preferences. For citizens, our results indicate that locating oneself on the right of the ideological spectrum is related to higher scores on the delegate–trustee scale, while supporting a populist party seems to decrease voters’ favourability toward trusteeship. Politicians’ preferences could not be explained by similar factors as none of the tested factors were significant. In line with our congruence analysis, there seems to be little variation in MPs’ representational preferences. Even groups of MPs that can be thought of as most likely to be delegates turn out to be staunch trustees, potentially causing frustration among citizens preferring delegate‐style representation.

Political choice is central to citizens’ participation in elections. Nonetheless, little is known about the individual‐level mechanisms that link political choice and turnout. It is argued in this article that turnout decisions are shaped not only by the differences between the parties (party polarisation), but also by the closeness of parties to citizens’ own ideological position (congruence), and that congruence matters more in polarised systems where more is at stake. Analysing cross‐national survey data from 80 elections, it is found that both polarisation and congruence have a mobilising effect, but that polarisation moderates the effect of congruence on turnout. To further explore the causal effect of political choice, the arrival of a new radical right‐wing party in Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), is leveraged and the findings show that the presence of the AfD had a mobilising effect, especially for citizens with congruent views.

Citizen satisfaction with democracy is greater when parties offer choices that are congruent with voter preferences. But are citizens content with simply having a party that represents their views or does their satisfaction depend on whether that party can also be instrumental in implementing policies? We argue that instrumentality moderates the effect of ideological congruence on democratic satisfaction. Combining an analysis of cross‐national survey data with an experimental conjoint design, we find that citizens able to vote for a congruent party with a chance of entering government are more satisfied with democracy, whereas congruence without instrumentality has no such effect.

This article focuses on the role of congruence in Creole formation and development, using a competition-and-selection framework. The proposal is that the similarities (the congruent features) that speakers perceive between the languages in contact are favored to participate in the emergence and development of a new language. Specifically, I illustrate how morphosyntactic and semantic features are more likely to be selected into the grammatical makeup of a given Creole when they PREEXIST and are shared by some of the source languages present in its linguistic ecology. This is empirically supported in this article by numerous case studies and a survey of congruent features in twenty contact languages across nineteen grammatical and lexical domains. In order to show how congruence operates, I propose a model of matter and pattern mapping, adapted to the multilingual setting in which Creole languages emerge.

Do citizens and Members of the European Parliament agree on the format and future of the EU? While the literature has emphasized the gap between pro-European elites and increasingly Eurosceptic electorates, this article relies on a novel dataset to explore the implications of measures of such (in)congruence at the EU level. We compare the preferences of elected representatives and of voters on a wide range of issues: democracy at the supranational level, the reform of EU policies, as well as institutions. The empirical analysis relies on a citizen survey and on an MEP survey conducted in the framework of the RECONNECT project. We evidence that the level of congruence varies across issues and that it is the representatives, not the citizens, who drive polarization.

Scholars have discovered remarkable inequalities in who gets represented in electoral democracies. Around the world, the preferences of the rich tend to be better represented than those of the less well‐off. In this paper, we use the most comprehensive comparative dataset of unequal representation available to answer why the poor are underrepresented. By leveraging variation over time and across countries, we study which factors explain why representation is more unequal in some places than in others. We compile a number of covariates examined in previous studies and use machine learning to describe which mechanisms best explain the data. Globally, we find that economic conditions and good governance are most important in determining the extent of unequal representation, and we find little support for hypotheses related to political institutions, interest groups or political behaviour, such as turnout. These results provide the first broadly comparative explanations for unequal representation.

Congruence between the policies implemented by elected representatives and voters’ policy preferences is fundamental to representation and democratic accountability. Can we anticipate a closer alignment between voters’ policy preferences and the policies explicitly adopted by elected representatives on the more electorally significant issues? We address this question using a simple game theoretic model, where we demonstrate that greater salience of a particular issue in elections leads to less congruence between the policies implemented by elected representatives compared to voters’ policy preferences on that very issue. This finding carries significant implications for the connection between electoral salience and representation on valence issues, and has particular relevance for understanding the democratic foundations of security and counterterrorism policies.

We investigate semigroups S which have the property that every subsemigroup of $S\times S$ which contains the diagonal $\{ (s,s)\colon s\in S\}$ is necessarily a congruence on S. We call such an S a DSC semigroup. It is well known that all finite groups are DSC, and easy to see that every DSC semigroup must be simple. Building on this, we show that for broad classes of semigroups, including periodic, stable, inverse and several well-known types of simple semigroups, the only DSC members are groups. However, it turns out that there exist nongroup DSC semigroups, which we obtain by utilising a construction introduced by Byleen for the purpose of constructing interesting congruence-free semigroups. Such examples can additionally be regular or bisimple.

A class of sequences called L-sequences is introduced, each one being a subsequence of a Collatz sequence. Every ordered pair $(v,w)$ of positive integers determines an odd positive integer P such that there exists an L-sequence of length n for every positive integer n, each term of which is congruent to P modulo $2^{v+w+1}$. The smallest possible initial term of such a sequence is described. If $3^v>2^{v+w}$ the L-sequence is increasing. Otherwise, it is decreasing, except if it is the constant sequence P. A central role is played by Bezout’s identity.

Methods for orthogonal Procrustes rotation and orthogonal rotation to a maximal sum of inner products are examined for the case when the matrices involved have different numbers of columns. An inner product solution offered by Cliff is generalized to the case of more than two matrices. A nonrandom start for a Procrustes solution suggested by Green and Gower is shown to give better results than a random start. The Green-Gower Procrustes solution (with nonrandom start) is generalized to the case of more than two matrices. Simulation studies indicate that both the generalized inner product solution and the generalized Procrustes solution tend to attain their global optima within acceptable computation times. A simple procedure is offered for approximating simple structure for the rotated matrices without affecting either the Procrustes or the inner product criterion.