Vox populi, vox dei? The effect of sociotropic and egocentric incongruence on democratic preferences

Abstract

Systemic congruence between the whole legislature and the whole electorate (‘many-to-many’, or sociotropic congruence) should be the benchmark to evaluate a democratic system. Yet, most studies link shifts in democratic preferences to individual-level representation (‘many-to-one’, or egocentric incongruence), since individual-level representation failures should be more salient and visible for individual citizens. We argue that the sociotropic incongruence hypothesis has not been appropriately tested to date, because the measure does not vary at individual level in observational data. Using an experiment conducted in France, we manipulate various sociotropic (in)congruence scenarios at the individual level. In addition to the incongruence hypotheses, our original experiment tests whether offering expertise-based justifications to incongruence attenuates the backlash against representatives. We find that, even when giving sociotropic incongruence a fair test, egocentric incongruence still consistently shapes democratic preferences, while the effect of sociotropic incongruence remains negligible. Furthermore, we find that narratives rooted in expertise claims do not attenuate the effect of representation failure on backlash against representative democracy: they exacerbate it.