Congruent, yet resentful? Issue incongruence, resentment and party position

This chapter investigates the relation between a voter’s policy incongruence and resentment. Incongruence refers to the mismatch between voters’ and parties’ preferences: we hypothesize that incongruence will be positively related to resentment. The more incongruent voters are with either their own preferred party ( egotropic incongruence) or the whole party system ( sociotropic incongruence), the less likely voters can expect policy that aligns with their preferences, and thus benefits them. Such incongruence likely fosters resentment. We further hypothesize that the relation between incongruence and resentment is moderated by voters’ party issue positions knowledge. Using the 2019 RepResent survey data, we find no support for the hypothesized relation between incongruence and resentment. Rather, we find strong indications that citizens’ party position knowledge moderates the relation between incongruence and resentment. This indicates that it does not just matter that citizens are incongruent with their preferred party and/or the party system, but also that they know they are incongruent.