High ideological proximity between parties and voters improves democratic representation. Research to date has focused on explaining voters-party congruence as a by-product of political developments and electoral results. Only a few scholars examined the overall effect of voters-party congruence on voting behaviour at the party system level. By creating a new dataset with data from 258 national elections, I examined whether ideological incongruence impacts participation in elections or induces a shift towards anti-political establishment parties. The central hypothesis is that high overall distance between the parties and their voters leads to growing detachment from the party system and hence increased abstention or voting for parties that criticise the traditional parties that form the core of the party system. The results are mixed as the hypotheses are not confirmed in all sample countries. In some parts of Europe, high levels of ideological incongruence are indeed associated with high abstention rates. However, the relationship between the two is not significant in all sample countries and throughout the past five decades.