Abstract
Political theorists maintain that citizens’ representation through elections is the cornerstone of democracy. However, many analysts claim that a deficit in democratic representation exists within the European Union. This research examines the ideological match between voters and their party using the 2009 European Election Study. Aggregate agreement between voters and their parties’ ideological position is very high, but agreement at the individual level is modest. Barely a majority of partisans favor the party that is closest to them on the Left–Right scale, and vote shifts to another party triples the representation gap. We model the factors affecting the size of this gap and voting for a nonproximate party. The results illustrate the representation gap that individual voters perceive in EU elections with implications for democratic representation.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
