Mark N. Franklin

Introduction: Issue Congruence and Political Responsiveness

It has long been realised that democratic governance requires a two-way flow of influence. Governments must be able to respond to what people want and people must be able to react to what governments do. These preconditions for democratic governance have been central to two research traditions on political representation. One of these, the responsible party approach, views policy change as a consequence of ‘electoral turnover’, while the other, the dynamic representation approach, focuses on policy change that occurs in ‘rational anticipation’ of electoral repercussions. The aim of this volume is to evaluate the state of political representation in contemporary Europe and to advance our understanding of the topic by presenting fresh insights both on the extent to which there exists issue congruence between voters and parties and the degree to which there is dynamic representation in the policy responses of representatives. This introduction describes in some detail the nature of the two approaches and then briefly summarises the contributions made in the remainder of the volume.

Turning Out or Turning Off: Do Mobilization and Attitudes Account for Turnout Differences between New and Established Member States at the 2004 EP Elections?

Abstract How can we understand the low turnout seen in the 2004 European Parliament elections? One possibility would be that new member states were ‘just different’ either because of the post‐communist legacy in some of them or because of an unexplicated ‘low propensity to vote’ in some of those. This article explicates the low propensity to vote in some post‐communist countries by means of a general model of turnout that applies also to established EU member states. In this model low turnout is accounted for by party loyalties on the one hand, and affective and instrumental reasons for voting on the other. The latter factors are found to be lacking in European Parliament elections, which can nevertheless see high turnout due to party loyalty or compulsory voting. Where both of these are absent we see particularly low turnout, as we did in five of the new member countries in 2004.

Cleavage Research: A Critical Appraisal

This article reviews the sub-field of cleavage research – the sub-field within which this special issue fits. It assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the sub-field and characterises it as (with some shining exceptions) being prone to weak theorising, loose logic, and/or shaky methodology (sometimes all three at once). These three themes are pursued in three separate sections of the article, after which the contents of the special issue are themselves assessed in the same terms.

Strategic Incentives, Issue Proximity and Party Support in Europe

The Issue Yield model predicts that parties will choose specific issues to emphasise, based on the joint assessment of electoral risks (how divisive is an issue within the party support base) and electoral opportunities (how widely supported is the same issue outside the party). According to this model, issues with high yield are those that combine a high affinity with the existing party base, together with a high potential to reach new voters. In previous work, the model showed a remarkable ability to explain aggregate issue importance as reported by party supporters, as well as issue emphasis in party manifestos. This paper tests the implications at the individual level by comparing a conventional model where issue salience is determined from manifesto data with a revised model where issue salience is determined by issue yield. The empirical findings show that issue yield is a more effective criterion than manifesto emphasis for identifying the issues most closely associated with party support in the minds of voters.

Party Matters: Heterogeneity in Party Characteristics when Explaining Electoral Support in Europe

Downs (1957) suggested that voters would be motivated to choose mainstream parties that were close to them in left-right terms, and researchers have assumed that the same preference for proximate parties would apply when considering issue locations. Indeed issues and left-right location have generally been seen as interchangeable theoretically, with left-right constituting a sort of super-issue. But recent research has proposed that specific issue preferences underlie support for so-called niche parties, suggesting a possible difference in motivations to support such parties and implying that issue location may not play the same role as left-right location in generating support for different types of party. In a framework that addresses both turnout and party choice, we propose that what Anthony Downs called party weight governs the way voters assess many party attributes, in particular paying less attention to ideological compatibility when it comes to smaller parties. Our findings support these conjectures.