Center for European Studies

Anderson 216

Ryan Bakker, University of Georgia

The apparent inability of mainstream politicians and parties to represent citizens destabilizes party systems and creates an opportunity for anti-establishment parties on the left and right. In this talk, Professor Bakker uses multiple measures of party-partisan incongruence to evaluate whether issue-level incongruence contributes to an erosion of democratic norms, dissatisfaction with democracy, and anti-establishment politics. For this analysis, Professor Bakker uses data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) and public data from the European Election Study (EES). The findings have implications for how electoral politics play out in different European settings and for normative concerns about the quality of political representation across various political contexts.

Sponsored by the Center for European Studies and the Department of Political Science.