Great minds think alike? Ideological congruence between party members and leadership candidates

Abstract

A central premise in representative democracy is that people vote for the party or candidate offering the best fit with their policy preferences. While central in studies on general elections, ideological congruence is underexposed in studies on intraparty elections. Our research maps one-to-one congruence between individual party members and their preferred candidate in a party leadership contest, and investigates whether members with high political sophistication and strong party linkage are more likely to cast a congruent vote. The analysis is based on original survey data collected among more than 4,300 party members of two Belgian parties. We find that ideological congruence in leadership elections is rather high, but that members do not always vote for the most congruent candidate. Like in general elections, sophisticated, engaged, and more satisfied voters cast a more congruent vote.

Appendices

Appendix

Dependent variables: survey question

In order to match members to their preferred candidate, we relied on this survey question: “Could you indicate for which candidate you have voted (or are going to vote)?”.

Next, we compared answers of members with those of the candidates on five issue scales. A comparison of the scores on these issue scales between members and candidates leads to five dependent variables for congruent voting and five dependent variables for correct voting (always one for each scale). The issue statements have been clustered per scale (mean value of the various dimensions). The survey question was “Please indicate whether you completely agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree or completely disagree with the following statements.”

• (a) Migration scale (Cronbach alpha 0.699 (CD&V), 0.727 (Open VLD))

  • Immigrants are required to adapt to the customs of this country.

  • European integration has gone too far.

  • Immigration is a serious threat to our national identity.

• (b) Materialism scale (Cronbach alpha 0.563 (CD&V), 0.573 (Open VLD))

  • Stricter measures must be taken for the protection of the environment. (reverse coding)

  • Our country must introduce a CO₂ tax. (reverse coding)

• (c) Regionalism scale (Cronbach alpha 0.700 (CD&V), 0.789 (Open VLD))

  • We should devolve more power to the regions in this country.

  • We have to re-federalise certain competences, i.e. transfer them from Flanders back to the Belgian level. (reverse coding)

• (d) Socio-economic scale (Cronbach alpha 0.432 (CD&V), 0.599 (Open VLD))

  • Income and wealth must be redistributed more than at present. (reverse coding)

  • There must be no cuts in social security. (reverse coding)

• (e) Moral-ethical dimension

  • The conditions under which euthanasia is legally possible should be further relaxed. (reverse coding)

Independent variables: survey questions

	Operationalisation	Survey question
Political sophistication	Highly educated	What is the highest certificate or diploma that you have obtained? 0 = No higher education, 1 = Higher education
	Political interest	To what extent are you interested in politics? Give a score from 0 to 10, where 0 means that you have no interest in politics at all and 10 means that you are very interested in it. With the intermediate scores you can nuance your answer
Party linkage	Degree of activism	How many hours per month do you spend on average on activities of the party (in a period outside of election campaigns)? (approximate if necessary)
	Length of party membership	Can you tell us how many years you have been a member of [party] (including the year 2019/2020 and the years that you were a member of [old party name])?
Mandate holder	Internal party position	Do you currently hold a position in your local party section or did you previously hold such a position? 0 = No current or past position, 1 = Current or past position
	Elected mandate	Do you currently hold an elected mandate (local councillor, alderman, Member of Parliament, …) or have you previously held such a mandate? 0 = No current or past mandate, 1 = Current or past mandate
Satisfaction with party membership	Satisfaction with party membership	To what extent are you satisfied with your membership of [party]? Please indicate this on the scale below, where 0 stands for "very dissatisfied" and 10 for "very satisfied"? You may indicate one digit on the following scale

Ordinal regression analyses (robustness check)

	CD&V	Open VLD
Political sophistication
Political interest (Scale)	0.05 (0.03)	0.07 (0.04)#
Highly educated (Binary)	0.03 (0.09)	− 0.13 (0.11)
Party linkage
Degree of activism (In hours/month)	0.00 (0.00)	0.00 (0.00)
Length of party membership (In years)	0.00 (0.00)	0.00 (0.00)
Mandate holders
Elected position (Binary)	− 0.24 (0.15)#	− 0.21 (0.19)
Internal party position (Binary)	0.17 (0.10)#	0.01 (0.12)
Satisfaction with party membership (Scale)	0.02 (0.02)	0.05 (0.03)#
Controls
Ideological voting motive (Binary)	− 0.03 (0.09)	− 0.12 (0.10)
Socio-demo voting motive (Binary)	0.00 (0.10)	− 0.26 (0.20)
Female (Binary)	− 0.24 (0.10)*	0.33 (0.13)**
Age (Ref. cat.: 18–34)  35–64	0.19 (0.19)	0.18 (0.20)
64+	0.00 (0.11)	− 0.02 (0.13)
Cut points  Number of correct choices (0)	− 1.23 (0.37)***	− 3.75 (0.54)***
Number of correct choices (1)	0.48 (0.37)	− 0.98 (0.49)*
Number of correct choices (2)	2.15 (0.37)***	0.85 (0.49)#
Number of correct choices (3)	4.39 (0.41)***	2.69 (0.49)***
Number of correct choices (4)	Not applicable	5.22 (0.56)***
Nagelkerke pseudo R2	0.009	0.020
N	1820	1290

1. Estimates, standard errors between brackets. Data are weighted by candidate choice
2. ^#p < 0.1, *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001