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THE STUDY PRESENTS A THEORETICAL DISCUSSION AND AN EMPIRICAL TEST OF A THEORY OF CLEAVAGE STRUCTURE AND CROSSPRESSURE PROCESSES: STRUCTURE OF POLITICAL CLEAVAGES, PERCEPTIONS OF CROSS-PURPOSES- PARTISAN INTENSITY. AUSTRIAN SURVEY DATA ASSERTS THE PREDICTION THAT THOSE IN CUMULATIVE CLEAVAGE POSITIONS WILL BE STRONGER THAN THOSE IN CROSS-CUTTING CLEAVAGES.

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"--

Ideological congruence is the term generally used in comparative politics for the representative relationship between the general preferences of citizens and the perceived and stated position of government. This study provides a systematic comparative assessment of success and failure in achieving ideological congruence in nineteen developed parliamentary democracies from 1996 through to 2017. It then deconstructs the processes through which elections can connect citizens and governments into the three major stages: citizens' votes in parliamentary elections; the conversion of those votes into legislative representation; the election of prime ministers by their parliaments and the appointment of cabinet ministers. Analyzing these three stages shows that average distance from the median citizen increases at each stage, with only a few remarkable recoveries once congruence begins to go astray.

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.