DPP’s Felix Butzlaff and Bence Hamrak have co-authored an article with the European Journal for Political Research: “The paradox of representation: How identity fragmentation complicates voter-party congruence”

Felix Butzlaff, Postdoctoral Fellow at DPP, and Bence Hamrak, wo completed his dissertation at CEU in January of this year, have co-authored an article with the European Journal for Political Research, together with Jozef Mintal, Robert Vancel, and Kamila Borseková from Matej Bel University in Banska Bystrica in Slovakia. In their work, they ask how democratic representation should be measured in an era of increasingly individualized and volatile political identities, and fragile collective attachments. Traditionally, research on representation has sought a single best dimension measure of voter-party congruence and representative fit; yet, in postmodern societies marked by fluid and fragmented identities, this approach, they argue, oversimplifies voter choice and misrepresents the quality of democratic representation. To address these limitations, they draw on social theory diagnoses by scholars such as Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, or Ingolfur Blühdorn, that illuminate how contemporary processes of individualization, alienation, and fragmentation shape political identity formation and democratic representation.

In their article, they develop a novel framework of multi-point congruence to assess voter-party alignment by using a unique voting advice application dataset from Slovakia’s early elections in 2023 (N = 134,699), an illustrative case for postmodern electoral dynamics. They show competing logics of representation which expose a core democratic trade-off: tailoring representation to individual preferences enhances policy fit but erodes partisan clarity, potentially leading to higher voter volatility and weakening voter-party linkages at the system level. Overall, the framework will allow researchers to make a more nuanced and generalizable assessment of voter-party alignment and representative quality in fragmented party systems of the contemporary, capturing not just how alignment occurs, but the democratic tensions it entails.