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Frontmatter -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Tables -- Figures -- 1 Introduction / Democracy, Parties, and Performance -- 2 Political Performance / The Initial Comparison -- 3 The Social and Economic Environment -- 4 The Constitutional Setting -- 5 Party Systems and Election Outcomes -- 6 Citizen Involvement / Participation or Turmoil -- 7 Government Performance / Executive Stability -- 8 Managing Violence and Sustaining Democracy -- 9 Democratic Performance / Liberty, Competition, Responsiveness -- 10 Conclusion / Constraint and Creativity in Democracies -- Appendix -- Notes -- Index

"Democracy means, classically, "government by the people." For a very long time democracy in a large political system was believed by most thoughtful people to be both undesirable and unachievable. It was undesirable for two reasons. First, "the people" did not have the time, interest, knowledge, or ability to be able to govern with competence. Second, the majorities of "the people" were much less well off and in governing would strip the better off of their assets and status, precipitating intense conflict, bankruptcy, or both. Democracy in a large political system was in any case unachievable because, practically, it was impossible to bring the people together to collectively engage with the issues and tasks of governing"--

Democratic theory assumes that successful democratic representation will create close ideological congruence between citizens and their governments. The success of different types of election rules in creating such congruence is an ongoing target of political science research. As often in political science, a widely demonstrated empirical finding, the greater congruence associated with proportional representation election rules, has ceased to hold. I suggest that systematically taking account in our theories of conditional effects of local context can often provide a remedy. The systematic incorporation of levels of political party polarization into theory of election laws and ideological congruence extended the temporal and spatial range of the theory. Data from the Comparative Manifesto research program and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) research program are used to test the revised theory empirically. Suggestions for generalizing our theories of political context are offered. The results of this research continue the interactions between substantive research, ongoing political events, and the great normative issues of representation and democracy. Adapted from the source document.

Focusing on the left-right scale as a summary measure of citizens' and representatives' preferences, a growing body of literature has used a variety of approaches and data in measuring positions of citizens and representatives. The most recent studies, contrary to previous ones, show no significant difference between ideological congruence in single member district (SMD) and proportional representation (PR) electoral systems. This article examines the major alternative measurement approaches and data sets, finding that recent results are due to differences in time period, not differences in measurement approach. The associations between election rules and ideological congruence are relatively robust to various measurement approaches, as are estimations of the causal processes shaping ideological congruence. The association between election rules and congruence has declined in the past decade, as shown by all three major approaches, due primarily to convergence toward the median of plurality parties in the SMD elections. Adapted from the source document.

A sophisticated research tradition has explored theoretically and empirically the consequences of election laws for vote–seat disproportionality and, more recently, for the distance between citizen and legislative left–right medians. In contemporary parliamentary systems, policy making tends to be dominated by governments, not legislatures. This article extends election law theory to its expected effects on the left–right representativeness of governing parties and examines whether these are realized after eighty-two elections in fifteen mature parliamentary systems. The analysis shows how the legislative median party, the legislative plurality party and pre-election coalition agreements between parties shape these connections between citizens, legislatures and governments. The article also develops more nuanced measures of party influence on policy making and re-examines the governmental findings using these. Governments and policy-making configurations emerging from bargaining after PR elections are in net significantly closer to their citizens than those created by SMD elections.

Abstract: "Democratic responsiveness" occurs when the democratic process induces the government to form and implement policies that the citizens want. The linkages that connect citizens' preferences, electoral choices, selecting policymakers and policymaking can be subverted at each stage. There are also serious conceptual difficulties created by the complexity of citizen preferences and by uncontrollable factors that shape policy outcomes. The subversions include control over information, incoherence of party policy discourse, unrepresentative election outcomes, officials switching parties after elections, use of executive decrees, bait and switch campaign tactics, and corruption in policymaking. I offer some suggestions about the measurement of democratic responsiveness.