The blind corner of political representation

Much of the literature on political representation provides empirical evidence that elections successfully link the policy preferences of citizens to the policy preferences of their representatives in parliament and to public policy. However, most of these studies are based on the congruence on the left–right dimension rather than on specific issues. Using empirical data from the Netherlands we show that on specific issues elections seem to fail as an instrument to connect the policy preferences of a large part of the electorate to the policy positions of their representatives because these issues are poorly related to the left–right dimension.