Issue congruence between citizens and representatives in Latin America: a multidimensional perspective

Abstract

This paper proposes a methodological contribution to the empirical study of political representation. It explores the level of issue congruence between citizens and legislators from 15 Latin American countries. The goal is find out the degree of agreement between the attitudes of these two groups with respect to the intervention of the State in six aspects of the public sphere. For this purpose, two multivariate statistical methods were used: multidimensional scaling and Procrustes analysis. Through the first it was possible to know how these issues are structured for representatives and citizens; the second one provided an assessment of the degree of similarity between these structures. The contribution of the study is to consider the multidimensionality of issue congruence and the use of appropriate statistical tools to analyze it.