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Photo of Jonathan Polk. Photo.

Jonathan Polk

Professor

Photo of Jonathan Polk. Photo.

Multidimensional Incongruence, Political Disaffection, and Support for Anti-Establishment Parties

Author

  • Ryan Bakker
  • Seth Jolly
  • Jonathan Polk

Summary, in English

To what extent do representational gaps between parties and voters destabilise party systems and create electoral opportunities for anti-establishment parties on the left and right? In this paper, we use multiple measures of party-partisan incongruence to evaluate whether issue-level incongruence contributes to an increase of political disaffection and anti-establishment politics. For this analysis, we use data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) for party positions and public opinion data from the European Election Study (EES). Our findings indicate that multidimensional incongruence is associated with disaffection at the national and European level, and that disaffected mainstream party voters are in turn more likely to consider voting for anti-establishment challenger parties. This finding suggests that perceived gaps in party-citizen substantive representation have important electoral ramifications across European democracies.

Publishing year

2020

Language

English

Pages

292-309

Publication/Series

Journal of European Public Policy

Volume

27

Issue

2

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Topic

  • Political Science

Keywords

  • European Union
  • political parties
  • representation
  • populism

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1350-1763