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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.

A sophisticated research tradition has explored theoretically & empirically the consequences of election laws for vote-seat disproportionality &, more recently, for the distance between citizen & 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 & 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 & pre-election coalition agreements between parties shape these connections between citizens, legislatures & governments. The article also develops more nuanced measures of party influence on policy making & re-examines the governmental findings using these. Governments & policy-making configurations emerging from bargaining after PR elections are in net significantly closer to their citizens than those created by SMD elections. Tables, Appendixes. Adapted from the source document.

▪ Abstract  Two large research programs have analyzed election-based connections between citizens and policy makers in different democracies. Studies of vote-seat representation in the tradition of Rae (1967) begin with citizens' party votes and have made substantial progress in elucidating the impact of election laws, geographic vote distributions, and the number of parties and their interactions on the proportionality of party representation. Studies of substantive representation in the tradition of Miller & Stokes (1963) begin with citizen issue preferences and link these to the positions of their representatives. Most studies outside the United States, confronting multimember districts and the cohesion of party representatives, have focused on voter-party dyads rather than geographic constituencies, and confirmed the importance of issues linked to a common electoral discourse and the greater structure of legislator issue positions. Recently, a number of explicitly comparative analyses have begun to analyze collective correspondence and confront other limitations of the literature.

A discussion of the importance of responsiveness for the quality of democracy contends that responsiveness may be viewed as a series of linkages intended to ensure that governments respect the preferences of the governed. It is maintained that democratic responsiveness is an ongoing, complex, & dynamic process that begins with the policy preferences of citizens & moves through such stages as voting, election outcomes, formation of policy-making coalitions, policy making between elections, & public polices themselves. It is noted that similarities between government outcomes & citizen desires does not necessarily indicate democratic responsiveness. The need for institutional arrangements to provide incentives supporting linkages of responsiveness is discussed, along with conceptual difficulties involved in evaluating democratic responsiveness, & theoretical disputes related to empirical research on linkages between citizens' preferences, election outcomes, political influence, & policy outcomes. The need for a more complex research agenda encompassing multiple, context-sensitive measures of procedure, substantive content, & citizen evaluation is emphasized. 1 Table, 1 Figure. J. Lindroth

'Democracy and Social Change in India: A Cross-Sectional Analysis of the National Electorate' by Subrata K. Mitra and V. B. Singh is reviewed.