Do voters correctly perceive left-right positions of political parties? This question received considerable attention in the literature in the past decade. Previous research has shown that most voters have somewhat ‘correct’ perceptions of where parties are located on a left-right dimension, and that certain factors, like coalition membership, rhetoric, and changes in party leadership, influence how much those perceptions deviate from the real positions on average. Recent research demonstrated that ‘demand side’ factors, like which topics are most important to voters, also influence how they perceive party positions. This paper adds to this, relaxing the unitary actor assumption and introducing heterogeneity on the ‘supply side’ to the analysis. I argue that if party elites have heterogeneous positions, voter estimates of party positions deviating from the mean position but falling within the range of positions held by party elites can be considered just as correct, changing the notion of what should be considered a deviation from the correct position.

I test this expectation by combining individual-level data on voter party perceptions with a novel data set on intraparty heterogeneity, which exploits textual data from Twitter to estimate the positions of MPs in several European countries. The findings have potential implications for mass-elite linkages, representation, as well as voting behavior.