Publication

Do parties still represent their voters' preferences with regard to distributive policies? Negative answers can be found in the literature and they have been underlined empirically by studies showing that parties have changed their positions on economic policies as compared to the post-war past. This paper argues, however, that such an approach may underestimate party-voter congruence since it does not take shifting electoral configurations and shifting policy agendas into account, as parties may advocate different policies, because they represent different voters with different interests. The authors test their arguments with regard to labor market policy in several European countries.