Is opinion-policy congruence rewarded at the ballot box?

Abstract

It is well known that voters prefer parties whose policy positions align with their own. But do voters actually reward incumbents who implement policies preferred by the electorate? Using cross-country data covering more than 350 elections and opinion-policy congruence measures based on 166 issues, our analysis reveals an unexpected non-correlation between opinion-policy congruence and electoral success. Governments that implement (or keep in place) policies with higher levels of support in the electorate do not do better in subsequent elections. This result holds when controlling for the state of the economy, and when using other, country-specific, datasets. The study reinforces conclusions from previous research that retrospective policy voting seems to be very limited.