Mean voter representation and partisan constituency representation: Do parties respond to the mean voter position or to their supporters?

Party Politics

Volumn 17, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 275-301

  Ezrow, Lawrence ^a   de Vries, Catherine ^b   Steenbergen, Marco ^c   Edwards, Erica ^d  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM   (Netherlands)

^c UNIVERSITY OF BERN   (Switzerland)

^d UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA   (United States)

Author keywords

mainstream parties; mean voter; niche parties; political representation; responsiveness

Indexed keywords

EID: 79955450412     PISSN: 13540688     EISSN: 14603683     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1354068810372100     Document Type: Article

References (81)

1. Adams, James (2001) Party Competition and Responsible Party Government: A Theory of Spatial Competition Based Upon Insights from Behavioral Voting Research. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
2. Adams, James, Michael Clark, Lawrence Ezrow and Garrett Glasgow (2004) Understanding Change and Stability in Party Ideologies: Do Parties Respond to Public Opinion or to Past Election Results? British Journal of Political Science 34: 589-610.
3. Adams, James, Michael Clark, Lawrence Ezrow and Garrett Glasgow (2006) Are Niche Parties Fundamentally Different from Mainstream Parties?: The Causes and Electoral Consequences of Western European Parties' Policy Shifts, 1976-1998, American Journal of Political Science 50: 513-29.
4. Adams, James, Lawrence Ezrow and Zeynep Somer-Topcu (forthcoming)Is Anybody Listening? Evidence that Voters do not Respond to European Parties' Policy Programmes, American Journal of Political Science.
5. Adams, James and Samuel Merrill, III (1999) Party Policy Equilibrium for Alternative Spatial Voting Models: An Application to the Norwegian Storting, European Journal of Political Research 36: 235-55.
6. Adams, James and Samuel Merrill, III (2000) Spatial Models of Candidate Competition and the 1988 French Presidential Election: Are Presidential Candidates Vote-Maximizers? Journal of Politics 62: 729-56.
7. Adams, James and Samuel Merrill, III (2009) Policy-Seeking Parties in a Parliamentary Democracy with Proportional Representation: A Valence-Uncertainty Model, British Journal of Political Science 39: 539-58.
8. Adams, James, Samuel Merril III and Bernard Grofman (2005) A Unified Theory of Party Competition: A Cross-National Analysis Integrating Spatial and Behavioral Factors. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
9. Adams, James and Zeynep Somer-Topcu (2009) Policy Adjustment by Parties in Response to Rival Parties' Policy Shifts: Spatial Theory and the Dynamics of Party Competition in Twenty-Five Post-War Democracies, British Journal of Political Science 39: 825-46.
10. Alvarez, R. Michael, Jonathan Nagler and Shaun Bowler (2000) Issues, Economics, and Dynamics of Multiparty Elections: The 1987 British General Election, American Political Sci-ence Review 94: 131-49.
11. Andrews, Josephine and Jeannette Money (2009) The Spatial Structure of Party Competition: Party Dispersion within a Finite Policy Space, British Journal of Political Science 39: 805-24.
12. Beck, Nathaniel and Jonathan Katz (1995) What to Do (and Not to Do) with Time-Series Cross-Section Data, American Political Science Review 89: 634-47.
13. Beck, Nathaniel and Jonathan Katz (1996) Nuisance vs. Substance: Specifying and Estimating Time-Series-Cross-Section Models, Political Analysis 6: 1-36.
14. Benoit, Kenneth and Michael Laver (2006) Party Policy in Modern Democracies. London: Routledge.
15. Brambor, Thomas, William R. Clark and Matthew Golder (2006) Understanding Interaction Models: Improving Empirical Analyses, Political Analysis 14: 63-82.
16. Budge, Ian (1994) A New Theory of Party Competition: Uncertainty, Ideology, and Policy Equilibria Viewed Comparatively and Temporally, British Journal of Political Science 24: 443-67.
17. Budge, Ian and Michael McDonald (2006) Choices Parties Define: Policy Alternatives in Representative Elections - 17 Countries 1945-1998, Party Politics 12: 451-66.
18. Budge, Ian, Lawrence Ezrow and Michael M. McDonald (forthcoming)Ideology, Party Factionalism and Policy Change: An Integrated Dynamic Theory, British Journal of Political Science.
19. Budge, Ian, Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Andrea Volkens, Judith Bara and Eric Tanenbaum (2001) Mapping Policy Preferences: Estimates for Parties, Electors, and Governments 1945-1998. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
20. Burt, Gordon (1997) Party Policy: Decision Rule or Chance? A Note on Budge's New Spatial Theory of Party Competition, British Journal of Political Science 27: 647-58.
21. Calvo, Ernesto and Timothy Hellwig (forthcoming)Centripetal and Centrifugal Incentives under Different Electoral Systems, American Journal of Political Science.
22. Carrubba, Clifford (2001) The Electoral Connection in European Union Politics, Journal of Politics 63: 141-58.
23. Clark, Michael (2009) 'Valence and Electoral Outcomes in Western Europe, 1976-1998', Electoral Studies 28: 111-22.
24. D'Alimonte, Roberto (1999) Party Behavior in a Polarized System: The Italian Communist Party and the Historic Compromise, in Wolfgang Müller and Kaare Strøm (eds) Policy, Office, or Votes? How Political Parties in Western Europe Make Hard Decisions, pp. 141-71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
25. Dalton, Russell (1985) Political Parties and Political Representation, Comparative Political Studies 17: 267-99.
26. Dow, Jay K. (2001) A Comparative Spatial Analysis of Majoritarian and Proportional Elections, Electoral Studies 20: 109-25.
27. Downs, Anthony (1957) An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper.
28. Enelow, James and Melvin Hinich (1984) The Spatial Theory of Voting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
29. Erikson, Robert and David Romero (1990) Candidate Equilibrium and the Behavioral Model of the Vote, American Political Science Review 84: 1103-26.
30. Erikson, Robert, Michael MacKuen and James Stimson (2002) The Macro Polity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
31. Ezrow, Lawrence (2007) The Variance Matters: How Party Systems Represent the Preferences of Voters, Journal of Politics 69: 182-92.
32. Ezrow, Lawrence (2008) Research Note: On the Inverse Relationship between Votes and Proximity for Niche Parties, European Journal of Political Research 47: 206-20.
33. Fowler, James H. and Michael Laver (2006) A Tournament of Party Decision Rules. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia.
34. Glasgow, Garrett and R. Michael Alvarez (2005) Voting Behavior and the Electoral Context of Government Formation, Electoral Studies 24: 245-64.
35. Green, Donald P., Soo Yeon Kim and David H. Yoon (2001) Dirty Pool, International Organization 55: 441-68.
36. Green, Jane and Sara B. Hobolt (2008) Owning the Issue Agenda: Party Strategies and Vote Choices in British Politics, Electoral Studies 27: 460-76.
37. Haupt, Andrea (2010) Parties and Globalization: What is Left for the Left, and Right for the Right? Party Politics 16(1): 5-27.
38. Hearl, Derek (2001) Checking the Party Policy Estimates: Reliability, in Ian Budge, Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Andrea Volkens, Judith Bara and Eric Tanenbaum (eds) Mapping Policy Preferences: Estimates for Parties, Electors, and Governments 1945-1998, pp. 111-25. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
39. Hellwig, Timothy, Anna Mikulska and Burcu Gezgor (forthcoming)Perceptions of Policy Choice in Contemporary Democracies, European Journal of Political Research.
40. Hobolt, Sara B. and Robert Klemmensen (2008) One for All, All for One: Issue Competition in Party Leader Rhetoric. Paper prepared for the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.
41. Hobolt, Sara B. and Robert Klemmensen (2009) The Dynamics of Voter Preferences and Party Leader Positions. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, 3-6 April.
42. Hsiao, Cheng (2003) Analysis of Panel Data, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
43. Huber, John (1989) Values and Partisanship in Left-Right Orientations: Measuring Ideology, European Journal of Political Research 17: 599-621.
44. Huber, John and G. Bingham Powell, Jr. (1994) Congruence Between Citizens and Policymakers in Two Visions of Liberal Democracy, World Politics 46: 291-326.
45. Kedar, Orit (2005) When Moderate Voters Prefer Extreme Parties: Policy Balancing in Parliamentary Elections, American Political Science Review 99: 185-99.
46. Keman, Hans and Paul Pennings (2006) Competition and Coalescence in European Party Systems: Social Democracy and Christian Democracy Moving into the 21st Century, Swiss Political Science Review 12: 95-126.
47. Kirchheimer, Otto (1966) The Transformation of Western European Party Systems, in Joseph La Palombara and Myron Weiner (eds) Political Parties and Political Development, pp. 177-200. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
48. Kitschelt, Herbert (1988) 'Organization and Strategy of Belgian and West German Ecology Parties: A New Dynamic of Party Politics in Western Europe? ' Comparative Politics 20: 127-54.
49. Kitschelt, Herbert (1994) The Transformation of European Social Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press.
50. Kitschelt, Herbert (1997) European Party Systems: Continuity and Change, in Martin Rhodes, Paul Heywood and Vincent Wright (eds) Developments in West European Politics, pp. 131-- 50. New York: St. Martin's Press.
51. Klingemann, Hans-Dieter, Andrea Volkens, Judith Bara, Ian Budge and Michael D. McDonald (2006) Mapping Policy Preferences II: Estimates for Parties, Electors and Governments in Central and Eastern Europe, European Union and OECD 1990-2003. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
52. Kriesi, Hanspeter, Edgar Grande, Romain Lachat, Martin Dolezal, Simon Bornschier and Timotheos Frey (2006) Globalization and the Transformation of the National Political Space: Six European Countries Compared, European Journal of Political Research 45: 921-56.
53. Laver, Michael (2005) Policy and the Dynamics of Political Competition, American Political Science Review 99: 263-81.
54. Laver, Michael, Kenneth Benoit and John Garry (2003) Extracting Policy Positions from Political Texts Using Words as Data, American Political Science Review 97: 311-31.
55. Lijphart, Arend (1999) Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
56. Lin, Tse-Min, James Enelow and Han Dorussen (1999) Equilibrium in Multicandidate Probabilistic Spatial Voting, Public Choice 98: 59-82.
57. Marks, Gary (ed.)(2007) 'Special Symposium. Comparing Measures of Party Positioning: Expert, Manifesto, and Survey Data', Electoral Studies 26: 1-141.
58. Marks, Gary, Liesbet Hooghe, Moira Nelson and Erica E. Edwards (2006) Party Competition and European Integration in East and West Europe: Different Structure, Same Causality, Comparative Political Studies 39: 155-79.
59. McDonald, Michael and Ian Budge (2005) Elections, Parties, and Democracy: Conferring the Median Mandate. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
60. McDonald, Michael and Sylvia Mendes (2001) Checking the Party Policy Estimates: Convergent Validity, in Ian Budge, Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Andrea Volkens, Judith Bara and Eric Tanenbaum (eds) Mapping Policy Preferences: Estimates for Parties, Electors, and Governments 1945-1998, pp. 127-42. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
61. Meguid, Bonnie (2005) Competition between Unequals: The Role of Mainstream Party Strategy and Niche Party Success, American Political Science Review 99: 347-60.
62. Meguid, Bonnie (2008) Party Competition between Unequals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
63. Merrill, Samuel, III and Bernard Grofman (1999) A Unified Theory of Voting: Directional and Proximity Models. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
64. Mikhaylov, Slava, Michael Laver and Kenneth Benoit (2008) Coder Reliability and Misclassification in Comparative Manifesto Project Codings. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.
65. Müller, Wolfgang C. and Kaare Strøm (eds) (1999) Policy, Office, or Votes? How Political Parties in Western Europe Make Hard Decisions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
66. Powell, G. Bingham (2000) Elections as Instruments of Democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
67. Przeworski, Adam and John Sprague (1986) Paper Stones: A History of Electoral Socialism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
68. Rogers, William H. (1993) Regression Standard Errors in Clustered Samples, Stata Technical Bulletin 13: 19-23.
69. Schmitt, Herman and Evi Scholz (2005). The Mannheim Eurobarometer Trend File, 1970-2002 [Computer file]. Prepared by Zentralarchiv für Empirische Sozialforschung. ICPSR04357-v1. Mannheim, Germany: Mannheimer Zentrum für Europaische Socialforschung and Zentrum für Umfragen, Methoden und Analysen [producers]. Cologne, Germany: Zentralarchiv für Empirische Sozialforschung/Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributors], 2005-12-06.
70. Schofield, Norman and Itai Sened (2005) Modeling the Interaction of Parties, Activists, and Voters: Why is the Political Center so Empty? European Journal of Political Research 44: 355-90.
71. Schofield, Norman and Itai Sened (2006) Multiparty Democracy: Parties, Elections, and Legislative Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
72. Schofield, Norman, Andrew Martin, Kevin Quinn and David Nixon (1998) Multiparty Electoral Competition in the Netherlands and Germany: A Model Based on Multinomial Probit, Public Choice 97: 257-93.
73. Somer-Topcu, Zeynep (2007) Party Policy Strategies and Valence Issues: The Effect of Government Membership and Economic Performance on Parties' Policy Strategies in Post-Communist Europe. Working paper.
74. Somer-Topcu, Zeynep (2009) 'Timely Decisions: The Effects of Past National Elections on Party Policy Change', Journal of Politics 71: 238-48.
75. Steenbergen, Marco, Erica E. Edwards and Catherine E. De Vries (2007) Who's Cueing Whom?: Mass-Elite Linkages and the Future of European Integration, European Union Politics 8: 13-35.
76. Stimson, James, Michael MacKuen and Robert Erikson (1995) Dynamic Representation, American Political Science Review 89: 543-65.
77. Tarrow, Sidney (1989) Democracy and Disorder. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
78. Van Kersbergen, Kees (1999) Contemporary Christian Democracy and the Demise of the Politics of Mediation, in Herbert Kitschelt, Peter Lange, Gary Marks and John D. Stephens (eds) Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism, pp. 346-70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
79. Weissberg, Robert (1978) Collective vs. Dyadic Representation in Congress, American Political Science Review 72: 535-47.
80. Wessels, Bernhard (1999) System Characteristics Matter. Empirical Evidence from Ten Representation Studies, in Warren Miller, Sören Holmberg and Roy Pierce (eds) Policy Representation in Western Democracies, pp. 137-61. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
81. Williams, Rick L. (2000) A Note on Robust Variance Estimation for Cluster-Correlated Data, Biometrics 56: 645-6.