G. Bingham Powell

American Voter Turnout in Comparative Perspective

Despite relatively favorable citizen attitudes, voter turnout in American national elections is far below the average of 80% of the eligible electorate that votes in other industrialized democracies. The American institutional setting—particularly the party system and the registration laws—severely inhibits voter turnout, and probably also accounts for the unusual degree to which education and other socioeconomic resources are directly linked to voting participation in the United States.Using a combination of aggregate and comparative survey data, the present analysis suggests that in comparative perspective, turnout in the United States is advantaged about 5% by political attitudes, but disadvantaged 13% by the party system and institutional factors, and up to 14% by the registration laws. The experience of other democracies suggests that encouraging voter participation would contribute to channeling discontent through the electoral process. Even a significantly expanded American electorate would be more interested and involved in political activity than are present voters in most other democracies.

Congruence between Citizens and Policymakers in Two Visions of Liberal Democracy

This paper explores two quite different visions of the democratic processes that can create congruence between citizen preferences and public policies. In the Majority Control vision , electoral competition and citizen choices result in the direct election of governments committed to policies corresponding to the preferences of the median voter. In the Proportionate Influence vision , election outcomes result in legislatures that reflect the preferences of all citizens; legislative bargaining results in policies linked to the position of the median voter. The authors give more explicit theoretical form to those visions and link them empirically to specific types of modern democracies. They then attempt to test the success of each vision in bringing about congruence between citizen self-placements and the estimated positions of governments and policymaker coalitions on the left-right scale in twelve nations in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although the analysis reveals weaknesses in each approach, it suggests a consistent advantage for the Proportionate Influence vision.

The Chain of Responsiveness

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.

The Ideological Congruence Controversy: The Impact of Alternative Measures, Data, and Time Periods on the Effects of Election Rules

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.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...

Constitutional Design and Citizen Electoral Control

Empirical theories of electoral and legislative politics can be used to build propositions about the consequences of constitutional designs for citizen electroal control. This article reports preliminary tests of such propositions. Constitutional arrangements in 16 democracies are compared to the degree of clarity of responsibility, opportunity for party choice, decisiveness of elections and effective representation in policy-making, before and after elections. Previous work had suggested that different models of citizen control require different combinations of these characteristics. The preliminary analysis shows constitutional designs that emphasized majoritarian election laws and government dominance in the legislature generally succeeded in creating conditions for the Government Accountability and, to a lesser degree, Government Mandate models of citizen control, but did poorly in creating conditions for the Representative Delegate model. The consensual constitutional designs were generally successful only in creating conditions for the Representative Delegate model. However, much additional work remains.

Election Laws and Representative Governments: Beyond Votes and Seats

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.

Party Systems and Political System Performance: Voting Participation, Government Stability and Mass Violence in Contemporary Democracies

This article examines alternative visions of “strong” party systems by analyzing relationships between party systems and several dimensions of performance of the political process in 28 democracies of the 1967-1976 decade. Party system theorists agree that voting support for extremist parties manifests a weakness in the party system. They disagree, however, about the virtues or vices of party majorities and close linkages between social groups and parties. The evidence, including multivariate analysis of party system types and characteristics, with controls for environmental conditions, indicates that during this period extremist party support was associated with executive instability and mass rioting. Scholarly concern about other aspects of party system strength or weakness should focus on the desired feature of political performance. The representational, multiparty systems were most successful in limiting rioting. Aggregative majorities , responsible majorities , and representational party systems all had good executive stability in the short run, although the first two types seemed somewhat more stable over the decade. Aggregative majority party systems were associated with low citizen voting participation.

Representation and Policy Responsiveness: The Median Voter, Election Rules, and Redistributive Welfare Spending

Many economic and social conditions shape public welfare spending. We are able to show, however, that after taking account of these conditions, the expressed left-right preferences of the median voters significantly affect comparative welfare spending. These new findings support the representational claims of liberal democracy and the theoretical expectations of the literature on ideological congruence. However, we also show that insofar as the preferences of citizens and the promises of governing parties (which are highly correlated,) can be disentangled, it is the former that affect the long-term redistributive welfare spending equilibrium, while the latter have small, but significant short-term effects. Surprisingly, despite greater representational correspondence between positions of voters and governments under PR than SMD, the impact of the median voter preferences is quite similar under the two systems.

Electoral Systems, Party Systems, and Ideological Representation: An Analysis of Distortion in Western Democracies

The effects of party system features and election rules on ideological representation can be seen in parliamentary elections in Western democracies over a fiftyyear period. “Distortion” is short-term representation failure—the distance between the median voter and the legislature or government immediately after the election. Electoral choice and left-right positions of parties (from the manifesto data) can be used to estimate median voter positions. The number of parties, party polarization, and the election rules all independently affect ideological distances. But party system polarization seems to be the predominate factor shaping distortion of governments’ relationship with the median voter. Examining the effects of party systems under different election rules helps clarify the causal connections between legislative and government levels. Democracy means government by the people. In modern nation-states policies are predominately made by elected representatives of the people, rather than by the people themselves. Political scientists have invested a great deal of effort in exploring the connections between the people and these representatives. One element that looms large in both theoretical and empirical studies is systematically generated correspondence between the preferences of the people and the commitments of their chosen representatives. Such correspondence is sometimes identified as the definition of democracy, as its best justification, or as essential to its overarching goal. We need not debate alternative definitions or explore the complexities of interests and preferences to accept that agreement between citizens and representatives is “one of the most important notions within the broad family of theories of representative democracy.” If elections systematically fail to generate close correspondence between the preferences of citizens and the stated positions of those they elect, what is here called “distortion,” the quality of the democratic process may be diminished. In comparative studies of representation, two general empirical approaches can be discerned. One of these assumes that what voters want is best summarized by their partisan vote; representation is measured by comparing the distribution of party votes with

Representation in Context: Election Laws and Ideological Congruence Between Citizens and Governments

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.