Organizing Democratic Choice Party Representation Over Time

by Budge, Ian; McDonald, Michael; Pennings, Paul; Keman, Hans

• ISBN13: 9780199654932
• ISBN10: 019965493X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-09-07
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This bold venture into democratic theory offers a new and reinvigorating thesis for how democracy delivers on its promise of public control over public policy. In theory, popular control could be achieved through a process entirely driven by supply-side politics, with omniscient and strategic political parties converging on the median voter's policy preference at every turn. However, this would imply that there would be no distinguishable political parties (or even any reason for parties to exist) and no choice for a public to make. The more realistic view taken here portrays democracy as an ongoing series of give and take between political parties' policy supply and a mass public's policy demand. Political parties organize democratic choices as divergent policy alternatives, none of which is likely to satisfy the public's policy preferences at any one turn. While the one-off, short-run consequence of a single election often results in differences between the policies that parliaments and governments pursue and the preferences their publics hold, the authors construct theoretical arguments, employ computer simulations, and follow up with empirical analysis to show how, why, and under what conditions democratic representation reveals itself over time. Democracy, viewed as a process rather than a single electoral event, can and usually does forge strong and congruent linkages between a public and its government. This original thesis offers a challenge to democratic pessimists who would have everyone believe that neither political parties nor mass publics are up to the tasks that democracy assigns them.

Comparative Politics is a series for students, teachers, and researchers of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu (http://www.ecprnet.eu)
The Comparative Politics series is edited by Professor David M. Farrell, School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin, Kenneth Carty, Professor of Political Science, University of British Columbia, and Professor Dirk Berg-Schlosser, Institute of Political Science, Philipps University, Marburg.

Table of Contents

Tables and Figures	p. xiii
Introduction: Representation as Process	p. 1
Party Convergence and Beyond
Convergence in Context: Simulating Party-Elector Interactions within a Downsian Framework	p. 19
Overview	p. 19
The logic of party convergence	p. 20
Representation through party convergence	p. 23
Representational consequences of party convergence and divergence compared	p. 26
Deterministic policy voting	p. 30
Comparative evidence for policy deterministic voting	p. 33
Conclusions and overview	p. 40 Appendix:
Party Stability, Voting Cycles, and Convergence: Comparative Evidence	p. 53
Introduction	p. 53
Electoral endorsement of parties-how stable?	p. 54
Cycling, democracy, and convergence	p. 61
The stability and continuity of political parties: a theoretical inconsistency in the convergence thesis	p. 63
How far do parties actually converge? Comparative evidence	p. 66
Summary and overview	p. 70
Unpacking the Convergence Model	p. 71
Rationale	p. 71
Downsian modelling assumptions re-examined	p. 72
Measuring the connection between popular preferences and public policy: congruence, neutrality, and responsiveness	p. 79
How parties influence the connection between popular preferences and public policy	p. 84
Living with non-convergence	p. 86
Party Divergence: Causes and Consequences
The Dynamics of Divergence: Ideology, Factionalism, and Representation	p. 91
Parties, policy, and representation	p. 91
The parties' role: an overview	p. 96
Patterns of party movement	p. 97
Explanations of party policy change	p. 98
Some representational consequences of party policy movement: voter preferences and government intentions	p. 104
Party policy behaviour: an overview	p. 109
Representing Voters
Identifying Majority Preferences: Median or Plurality Voter?	p. 113
Decision-making through representative elections: an overview	p. 113
Party votes as policy endorsements under the possibility of non-policy voting	p. 115
Voter majority preferences: which position is the carrier?	p. 119
Reassessing the median and the mode	p. 122
Identifying majority preferences: endorsement of the median or of the plurality party voter?	p. 126
What is the difference? Tracking median versus modal voter positions comparatively and temporally	p. 131
Reflecting the mode and the median in government	p. 136
What of the median citizen?	p. 141
Conclusions	p. 143
Representation Over Time: Empowering Both Plurality and Median Voter Preferences Through Policy Inertia-A Model and Simulation	p. 145
Putting it all together	p. 145
Congruence	p. 147
The pace of policy change	p. 153
Implications of slow-paced change	p. 158
Bringing in comparative evidence	p. 160
What happens when policy is not left-right and/or uni-dimensional?	p. 167
Conclusions	p. 169
Representation and the Pace of Policy Change: A Comparative Over-time Analysis	p. 170
Do elections direct policy?	p. 171
Descriptive analysis	p. 172
Persistence of explainable regime differences	p. 179
A unified cross-national, cross-temporal model of democratic policy-making	p. 186
Estimating congruence, neutrality, and responsiveness from the regression relationships	p. 189
Conclusion	p. 191
Appendix: Extending the aggregate analysis to defence and foreign policy	p. 193
Representing Citizens
The Nature of Citizen Preferences: Meaningful and Stable?	p. 199
Introduction	p. 199
Elector/citizen preferences: meaningful and stable?	p. 202
Elector/citizen preferences: uni-dimensional, multi-dimensional or both?	p. 207
Relating Elector to Voter Preferences	p. 211
Introduction	p. 211
Data overview	p. 212
How well do voters represent electors? (In)congruence and bias	p. 215
Voter responsiveness to electors	p. 218
Long-term relationship between elector and voter preferences	p. 221
Conclusions	p. 225
Citizen Preferences and Public Policy	p. 226
Introduction	p. 226
Party bracketing of electors	p. 228
Citizen preferences and public policy in eight countries, 1973-95	p. 229
Congruence and bias in enacted policy-an overview	p. 242
A necessary connection?	p. 244
The Representational Process
Parties Diverge around Electors-but not too much. Policy Responds-but not too fast	p. 251
Representational processes: an overview	p. 251
Representing preferences for change	p. 254
Spatial representations of policy processes: Does our theory fit them all? And what about cyclic majorities and the median?	p. 258
Does democracy work? Conclusions and overview	p. 262
Partisan Governments, Centrist Preferences: Resolving the Paradox of Party Representation	p. 263
Introduction: the paradox	p. 263
Forming governments, losing votes	p. 264
Citizens and parties in a nation's left-right space	p. 266
Policy representation	p. 267
Formalizing the centrist tendencies	p. 271
Alternation in government	p. 274
Conclusions	p. 279
Representing Representation: A Core Theory for Political Science	p. 281
Beyond economics and rational choice	p. 281
Basic considerations for an alternative to economic theorizing	p. 283
Democratic representation propositionalized	p. 287
The spatial theory of representation: focus for a science of politics	p. 289
Bibliography	p. 291
Index	p. 303
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