Government intentions and citizen preferences in dynamic perspective

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 41, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 599-619

  Warwick, Paul V ^a  

^a SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79959299458     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123410000542     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. Michael D. McDonald and Ian Budge, Elections, Parties, Democracy: Conferring the Median Mandate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
2. According to McDonald and Budge (Elections, Parties, Democracy, pp. 20-1), an interpretation in terms of government mandates is implicit in such well-known models as the 'Westminster model' and the 'responsible party model'. The key conditions are that parties have distinct policy positions, that voters recognize these distinctions and vote accordingly, and that one choice (party or coalition) receives a majority of votes, forms the government and carries out its electoral commitments.
3. McDonald and Budge, Elections, Parties, and Democracy, pp. 22-4.
4. McDonald and Budge, Elections, Parties, and Democracy, p. 108.
5. McDonald and Budge's evidence for one-dimensional policy spaces is presented in Elections, Parties, and Democracy, pp. 81-7.
6. The median voter theorem, as it is known, is attributable to Duncan Black, 'On the Rationale of Group Decision-making', Journal of Political Economy, 56 (1948), 23-34.
7. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1957).
8. McDonald and Budge, Elections, Parties, and Democracy, pp. 61-77.
9. Very recently, McDonald and Budge ('From Popular Majorities to Policy Representation: How Democracy Represents the Median Citizen by Responding to Median and Modal Voters', read at the Mini-Conference on Citizen Preferences, Political Institutions, and Democratic Performance, at Florida State University, 2009) have attempted to defend the median mandate interpretation by suggesting that governments, for reasons beyond their control, may end up implementing a policy stance that is much more centrist than they had promised. This revised understanding of the median mandate is discussed in the conclusion.
10. McDonald and Budge, Elections, Parties, and Democracy, pp. 184-97.
11. As McDonald and Budge, Elections, Parties, and Democracy, pp. 186-7, put it: 'A failure to find shifts in parliamentary and government preferences in response to electoral ones would be enough to dismiss our median mandate thesis'.
12. Hee Min Kim and Richard Fording, 'Voter Ideology in Western Democracies, 1946-1989', European Journal of Political Research, 33 (1998), 73-97;
13. Hee Min Kim and Richard Fording, 'Government Partisanship in Western Democracies, 1945-1998', European Journal of Political Research, 41 (2002), 187-206.
14. More systematic evidence on this point will be provided later. McDonald and Budge, Elections, Parties, Democracy, pp. 114-15.
15. Hermann Schmitt and Evi Scholz, The Mannheim Eurobarometer Trend File, 1970-2002 [Computer file], prepared and distributed by the Zentralarchiv fur Empirische Sozialforschung (Mannheim, Germany: Mannheimer Zentrum fur Europaische Sozialforschung and Zentrum fur Umfragen, Methoden und Analysen, 2005).
16. Hermann Schmitt and Matthew Loveless, The European Election Study 2004. [Computer file], prepared and distributed by the Mannheimer Zentrum fur Europaische Sozialforschung (Mannheim, Germany: Mannheimer Zentrum fur Europaische Sozialforschung, 2004).
17. McDonald and Budge, Elections, Parties, Democracy, p. 114.
18. Matt Golder and Jacek Stramski, 'Ideological Congruence and Two Visions of Democracy' (paper read at Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, 2007).
19. John Huber and Bingham Powell, 'Congruence between Citizens and Policy-Makers in Two Visions of Liberal Democracy', World Politics, 46 (1994), 291-326.
20. This assumption is probably more damaging when the Kim-Fording medians are calculated. Since intervals are created around parties rather than around the eleven points of the left-right scale, there will normally be fewer and hence larger intervals. Eric Browne and Mark Franklin, 'Aspects of Coalition Payoffs in European Parliamentary Democracies', American Political Science Review, 67 (1973), 453-69;
21. Paul V. Warwick and James N. Druckman, 'The Portfolio Allocation Paradox: An Investigation into the Nature of a Very Strong but Puzzling Relationship', European Journal of Political Research, 45 (2006), 635-65. (Pubitemid 43953867)
22. McDonald and Budge (Elections, Parties, Democracy, pp. 205-25)
23. Ian Budge and Michael Laver, 'Coalition Theory, Government Policy and Party Policy', in Michael Laver and Ian Budge, eds, Party Policy and Government Coalitions (New York: St. Martin's, 1992), 1-64.
24. Achen ('Measuring Representation: The Perils of the Correlation Coefficient', American Journal of Political Science, 21 (1977), 805-15, p. 807)
25. McDonald and Budge (Elections, Voters, Democracy, pp. 114-15) have doubts about the cross-national comparability of the latter, as noted earlier. They have no such doubts about the accuracy of expert assessments of party positions, however, which is the standard that will be used here.
26. Kenneth Benoit and Michael Laver, Party Policy in Modern Democracies (New York: Routledge, 2006).
27. In a comparison of several methods for measuring party positions, Matthew J. Gabel and John D. Huber, 'Putting Parties in Their Place: Inferring Party Left-Right Ideological Positions from Party Manifestos Data, American Journal of Political Science, 44 (2000), 94-103, p. 98
28. Also report a close correspondence between this method of placing parties and mean expert placements. Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Andrea Volkens, Judith Bara, Ian Budge and Michael McDonald, Mapping Policy Preferences II: Estimates for Parties, Electors and Governments in Eastern Europe, the European Union and the OECD, 1990-2003 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
29. Benoit and Laver, Party Policy in Modern Democracies, p. 274.
30. James Stimson, 'Regression in Space and Time: A Statistical Essay', American Journal of Political Science, 29 (1985), 914-47, at p. 945.
31. Nathaniel Beck and Jonathan Katz, 'What To Do (and Not to Do) with Time-Series-Cross-Section Data in Comparative Politics', American Political Science Review, 89 (1995), 634-47;
32. Nathaniel Beck and Jonathan N. Katz, 'Nuisance vs. Substance: Specifying and Estimating Time-Series-Cross-Section Models', Political Analysis, 6 (1996), 1-36.
33. The method used here for calculating the degree of autocorrelation is to regress the residuals on their lags and the other independent variables in the model (Nathaniel Beck, 'Time-Series Cross-Section Models', in J. Box-Steffensmeier, H. Brady and D. Collier, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Political Methodology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 475-83, at p. 478).
34. The estimated autocorrelation coefficient is r 5 0.44, p, 0.001. McDonald and Budge, Elections, Parties, Democracy, pp. 114-15.
35. Sophia Rabe-Hesketh and Anders Skrondal, Multilevel and Longitudinal Modeling Using Stata, 2nd edn (College Station, Tex.: Stata Press, 2008), pp. 114-15.
36. Sven Wilson and Daniel Butler, 'A Lot More To Do: The Sensitivity of Time-Series Cross-Section Analyses to Simple Alternative Specifications', Political Analysis, 15 (2007), 101-23.
37. As noted earlier, however, McDonald and Budge, Elections, Parties, and Democracy, pp. 117, 186-7
38. Make it clear that the slope is the key to assessing responsiveness (and that responsiveness is critical to the median mandate hypothesis). Beck, 'Time-Series Cross-Section Models', p. 478.
39. Christopher Achen, 'Why Lagged Dependent Variables Can Suppress the Explanatory Power of Other Independent Variables' (presented at the Annual Meeting of the Political Methodology Section of the American Political Science Association, Los Angeles, 2000), p. 7.
40. Mean non-congruence and mean imbalance are essentially equivalent to what McDonald and Budge (Elections, Parties, Democracy, pp. 122-32) call (overall) distortion and (overall) bias, respectively. The latter terms are not used here because they imply that the norm should be congruence between citizen/ voter medians and government positions. Spain and Portugal are also interesting in that their patterns are almost perfect opposites of each other.
41. Maurice Duverger, Les Partis politiques, 2nd edn (Paris: Colin, 1954), p. 247.
42. These include Huber and Powell, 'Congruence between Citizens and Policy-Makers';
43. Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 288;
44. McDonald and Budge, Elections, Parties, Democracy, pp. 128-9;
45. And G. Bingham Powell Jr, 'Election Laws and Representative Governments: Beyond Votes and Seats', British Journal of Political Science, 36 (2006), 291-315. (Pubitemid 43383287)
46. Andre Blais and Marc Andre Bodet, 'Does Proportional Representation Foster Closer Congruence Between Citizens and Policy Makers?' Comparative Political Studies, 39 (2006), 1243-62. (Pubitemid 44629968)
47. Golder and Stramski, 'Ideological Congruence'.
48. G. Bingham Powell Jr, 'The Ideological Congruence Controversy: The Impact of Alternative Conceptualizations and Data on the Effect of Election Rules', Comparative Political Studies, 42 (2009), 1475-97.
49. Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy, p. 162.
50. i represent party i's vote and legislative seat shares, respectively. Estimates may also be calculated using the maximum likelihood method. Rabe-Hesketh and Skrondel (Multilevel and Longitudinal Modelling, p. 82) recommend the empirical Bayes method because it tends to downplay the influence of countries that provide little information, but, in practice, the choice of method makes very little difference to the results to be presented here.
51. The correlation between estimated slope and mean non-congruence across all fifteen countries (France excluded) is r 5 0.50 (p 5 0.024 in a one-tailed test). McDonald and Budge, Elections, Parties, and Democracy, pp. 135-6, 143, 226.
52. Budge and McDonald, 'From Popular Majorities to Policy Representation'.
53. Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).