Two Sides of the Same Coin? Congruence and Responsiveness as Representative Democracy's Currencies

Abstract

The public opinion–policy linkage has received scholarly attention for a long time. After all, this linkage is not only a key characteristic of democracy, but one of the most important aspects and quality criteria of a functioning representative democracy. Despite more than 50 years of political science research, there is still a lot of controversy about how the linkage between public opinion and policy actually works. Two related but distinct strands have formed in the literature—one focusing on responsiveness, the other on congruence. While both schools of thought are ultimately interested in the link between public opinion and representatives’ position or behavior they pursue two different strategies leading to confusion over the concepts and measurement in question. We provide a mutually exclusive conceptualization of congruence and responsiveness and structure the review of the extensive literature accordingly. In addition to providing greater theoretical coherence, our conceptualization fosters further development in the field by deliberately combining the two concepts with the research strands on public policy and representation. We conclude with a call for a more integrated research agenda and introduce a novel concept of “congruent responsiveness.”

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