Electoral rules play an important role in determining citizen-elite ideological congruence. This is because they influence each stage of the representation process as one moves from citizen preferences to policy outcomes. Electoral rules directly affect ideological congruence due to the way they shape citizen preferences and the composition of party systems, legislatures, and governments. Electoral rules can also have an indirect effect on ideological congruence through the incentives they create for elite responsiveness and their impact on descriptive representation. In addition to reviewing the existing literature, this chapter suggests new avenues for future research. In particular, it suggests that significant gains can be made by addressing ideological congruence and responsiveness in a unified theoretical framework and by having more interaction between scholars of ideological congruence and those interested in descriptive and substantive representation.

One of the limits of previous studies using respondents’ self‐placements and subjective party placements to examine levels of citizen‐government congruence is that they were limited to the post‐1995 period. This article extends the number of elections where it is possible to examine levels of citizen‐government ideological congruence with a survey‐based approach. In particular, a unique dataset has been collected that combines data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and several national election studies. The results confirm recent studies that show that levels of citizen‐government ideological congruence are similar under majoritarian and proportional representation (PR) systems. Such studies, however, did not provide evidence that congruence is maintained over the course of a government's mandate. This article introduces, therefore, two measures of citizen‐government congruence that address this issue and that may revive the debate about which electoral systems strengthen the citizen‐government connection: citizen‐government congruence at the end of government mandates and change in congruence between elections. The results indicate that governments stay closer to the median citizens between elections under PR systems than under majoritarian systems. It is found, however, that this decrease in congruence in majoritarian systems is not detrimental to the point of observing smaller levels of congruence at the end of government mandates under majoritarian systems than under PR systems.

Previous works conceptualized responsiveness as parties following every movement of median voters (MV) or party supporters. We argue instead that whether a party should follow every movement of MVs/supporters is conditioned, first, by whether the MV (or supporter) moves toward or away from the party position and, second, by whether the party is policy or vote-oriented. We examine these claims based on survey data, which allow locating voter and party positions on a common ideological scale. Our main results nuance previous findings. We show that mainstream parties do adjust their position according to shifts in the position of MVs but only when these shifts are away from their position as predicted by a vote-seeking strategy. Our results also indicate that niche parties do adjust their position but only when their supporters move toward their position as predicted by a policy-oriented strategy. Overall, our results indicate that parties adjust their position with changes in public opinion, but that their responses are contingent on party characteristics and the direction of the change in public opinion.

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Congruence and responsiveness between the policy preferences of citizens and elites are considered key characteristics of democracy. Although these relationships between citizens and elites have been thoroughly examined, little attention has been devoted to differences in the representation of women and men in studies of congruence and responsiveness. Herein, I evaluate the presence of a gender gap both in terms of party congruence and party responsiveness with respect to the relationship between female and male supporters and the party they voted for. In addition, I examine whether the presence of elected women in parties decreases the gender gap in party congruence and responsiveness. My analyses of the data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and several national elections studies indicate that parties are generally as close and as responsive to the preferences of male supporters as to those of female supporters on the left–right ideological scale. However, the presence of elected women in parties favors women's representation and may thus reduce inequality in gender representation.