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Series Editors’ Preface
v
Series Editors’ Preface
vi
Preface
This book is based upon the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). The
most innovative characteristic of CSES is that it collects data from a great
number of countries both at the country level and at the level of individual
citizens. This makes it possible to study the effects of different institutional
arrangements on people’s political behaviour and their perception and evalu-
ation of the democratic process. It hardly needs to be argued how important
it is to know what these effects are. There is a growing body of literature argu-
ing that elections are no longer an effective instrument of democracy as they
are failing to connect the policy preferences of the electorate to government
policy. Also, people allegedly are losing their confidence in politicians, politi-
cal parties, and political institutions. Against this background, trying to find
out which kind of political-institutional arrangements serve electoral democ-
racy best and which institutions are better able to sustain people’s confidence
in them is like a quest for the Holy Grail.
Of course, the political institutions of different countries can differ in many
ways. Fortunately, there is some structure in these differences. Following
Lijphart’s seminal work Patterns of Democracy we make a distinction between
majoritarian and consensus models of democracy. These models are the embod-
iment in institutional structures of two different views of democracy. In the
majoritarian view the single most important function of an election is the
selection of a government. The concentration of power in the hands of an
elected majority government makes it accountable to the people. In consen-
sus models of democracy, or proportional systems, the major function of elec-
tions is to elect the members of parliament who together should be as
representative as possible of the electorate as a whole. The criterion for the
democratic quality of the system is how representative parliament really is.
This book explores how far these different views and their embodiment in
institutional structures influence vote choice, political participation, and sat-
isfaction with the functioning of democracy.
Unfortunately, we did not find the Holy Grail. Our major finding is that
formal political institutions and in particular the distinction between a con-
sensus and a majoritarian system of democracy are far less relevant for peo-
ple’s political behaviour and their perceptions and evaluations of the process
vii
Preface
viii
Preface
hosted and funded a research meeting at which first drafts of the chapters
were discussed. Janine van der Woude transformed the chapter drafts into a
single style manuscript. Dominic Byatt of Oxford University Press and the
series editors, Ian McAllister and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, have been sup-
portive and patient from the very beginning. As always, the staff at OUP did
a wonderful job preparing the final manuscript. I’m especially grateful to my
co-authors for their patience and perseverance. They never complained about
yet another revision, at least not in my presence.
Enschede, February 2014
Jacques Thomassen
ix
Contents
xi
Contents
References 255
Index 275
xii
List of Figures
xiii
List of Figures
xiv
List of Tables
xv
List of Tables
xvi
List of Tables
xvii
Contributors
Kees Aarts is Professor of Political Science and Scientific Director of the Institute for
Innovation and Governance Studies (IGS) at the University of Twente, the
Netherlands. His research interests are in democracy, elections, and political
behaviour. He received his BA and Master’s degrees from the University of
Amsterdam, and his PhD from the University of Twente.
Julian Bernauer is Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at the University of Berne,
Switzerland. His research interests include political representation, empirical theory
of democracy, and quantitative methodology. Recent publications have appeared in
Comparative Political Studies, the European Journal of Political Research and Electoral
Studies.
André Blais is Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Université de
Montréal and holds a Canada Research Chair in Electoral Studies. He is the principal
investigator of the Making Electoral Democracy Work project and the Chair of the
Planning Committee of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. He is Fellow of
the Royal Society of Canada and past President of the Canadian Political Science
Association. He is a member of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship.
His research interests are elections, electoral systems, turnout, public opinion, and
methodology.
Diana Burlacu is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Humboldt University of Berlin and
former Marie Curie Fellow in the Electoral Democracy Training Network at Central
European University, Budapest. Her research interests are in comparative politics,
with a particular focus on the consequences of the quality of governance on political
behaviour.
Eric Chang is Associate Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University. He
specializes in comparative political economy, political institutions, political
corruption, and democratization.
Yun-han Chu is Distinguished Research Fellow of the Institute of Political Science at
Academia Sinica and Professor of Political Science at National Taiwan University. He
specializes in politics of Greater China, East Asian political economy, and
democratization.
Harold Clarke is Ashbel Smith Professor in the School of Economic, Political and
Policy Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas, and Adjunct Professor in the
Department of Government at the University of Essex. He is the author of numerous
studies of British, US, and Canadian politics.
xviii
Contributors
xix
Contributors
xx
1
1.1 Introduction
This volume addresses the contrast between the view that elections are a
mechanism to hold government accountable and the view that they are a
means to ensure that citizens’ views and interests are properly represented in
the democratic process. It intends to explore how far this contrast and its
embodiment in institutional structures influence vote choice, political par-
ticipation, and satisfaction with the functioning of the system of political
representation and democracy in general. The volume is mainly based on
data from the second module of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems
(CSES) which had the same purpose.1 In this introduction we will further
expand on these different models of democracy and summarize how the fol-
lowing chapters contribute to our knowledge of the effects of different insti-
tutional arrangements on people’s political behaviour and their evaluation of
the functioning of democracy.
Ever since Schumpeter defined ‘the democratic method’ as ‘that institu-
tional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals
acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the peo-
ple’s vote’ (Schumpeter 1976, 1942), there is a broad consensus that competi-
tive elections are the identifying property of the contemporary democratic
process (Powell 2000).
However, as much consensus there is on the importance of competitive
elections for democracy, so little agreement there is on the precise function of
elections. Different theories of political representation have different views
on this. Most modern conceptions of democracy agree that the basic function
of elections is to connect the policy preferences of the people to public policy.
1
Jacques Thomassen
However, they differ in what is meant by ‘the people’ and in the mechanism
that is supposed to connect the policy preferences of the people to govern-
ment policy. The two main views of democracy are the majoritarian and the
consensus or proportional view of democracy (Lijphart 1984; Lijphart 1999;
Huber and Powell 1994; Powell 2000). According to Lijphart (1984: 4) the
main characteristic of the majoritarian view is that when the people are in
disagreement and have divergent preferences, the government should pri-
marily be responsive to the majority of the people. In the consensus view
government policy should be responsive to as many people as possible. These
different principles lead to different views on the function of elections and
are embodied in different political institutions.
In this volume we focus on the distinction between the majoritarian and
consensus models of democracy. These models are the embodiment in insti-
tutional structures of the two different views of democracy and reflect a dif-
ferent view on the functions of elections.2 In the majoritarian view the single
most important function of an election is the selection of a government. It
requires that the voters have a clear choice between two competing (groups
of) parties. The concentration of power in the hands of an elected majority
government brings the government under tight control of the majority of the
electorate. This control can be based on two different mechanisms, depend-
ing on voters’ time perspective or rather the considerations they take into
account when they decide how to vote. If voters base their choice on what the
(two) competing parties have on offer in their party manifestos, the winning
party can be said to have a policy mandate from a majority of the electorate
(Powell 2000: 8). This is basically the mechanism assumed by the Responsible
Party Model (Schattschneider 1942; APSA 1950; Thomassen 1994; Klinge-
mann et al. 1994).
However, this model of political representation is very demanding, in par-
ticular with regard to what is required of the voters. Also, a single vote can
hardly provide a policy mandate for a multiple package of issue dimensions.
Therefore, this model is often claimed to be totally unrealistic and unfeasible
(Riker 1982; Thomassen 1994). An alternative and perhaps more feasible
model is based on Schumpeter’s idea of a competitive democracy. In this
model elections are an accountability mechanism, where the sanctions are to
extend or not to extend the government’s tenure (Schumpeter 1976 (1942),
Chapter 22).
The major difference with the policy mandate model is that voters make
their vote choice on the basis of their evaluation of the performance of the
incumbent government. If they are satisfied with that performance, they will
vote for the party or parties in government; if they are dissatisfied, they will
‘throw the rascals out’. This model of accountability is far less demanding of
the voters because all they need to know is which party, or coalition of
2
Representation and Accountability
parties, is in power and which one is the opposition. Their information about
the content of government policy can be limited. Being satisfied or dissatis-
fied with the government, its policies, or the outcomes thereof is all it takes
(Fiorina 1981).
An essential requirement of this model of accountability at the system level
is the clarity of responsibility (Manin et al. 1999; Powell 2000; Lundell 2011).
Accountability is by definition close to impossible if it is not perfectly clear
who, i.e. which political party or coalition of parties, is responsible for gov-
ernment policy. But not only the incumbent but also the possible alternative
future government must be identifiable. A second requirement is that the
voters’ sanction of the party or parties in power is effective, i.e. that they
really can throw the rascals out without the risk that these (or some of them)
will return to power after having lost the elections. This mechanism can only
work in a majoritarian system where two (blocks of) parties compete for a
majority of the votes and the winner automatically takes (over) government
responsibility. A final requirement is that the voters do indeed hold the gov-
erning party or coalition of parties accountable for their performance while
in office, i.e. when they vote retrospectively.
In consensus models of democracy, or proportional systems, the major
function of elections is to elect the members of parliament who together
should be as representative as possible of the electorate as a whole. The crite-
rion for the democratic quality of the system is how representative parlia-
ment really is. There is no deterministic relationship between the election
outcome and the formation of the government. As a multiparty system is one
of the characteristics of a consensus model of democracy, usually a coalition
of several parties will be needed to form a majority government. Coalitions
will usually be broad, doing justice to the principle that not just a bare major-
ity but as many people as possible can influence government policy.
Between them, the two models of democracy fulfil the two most important
functions elections in a representative democracy have, according to main-
stream normative democratic theory. First, elections allow voters to deter-
mine the political colour of their government, making government
accountable to the judgement of the people. Second, elections produce a leg-
islature that is representative of the distribution of policy preferences amongst
the electorate. However, it may be obvious that there is a certain tension
between these two functions (Manin et al. 1999; Powell 2000; Lord and Pollak
2010; Aarts and Thomassen 2008a; Dalton et al. 2011a; Dalton et al. 2011b).
Electoral and more generally democratic systems cannot optimally serve both
functions at the same time. An important criterion of democracy underlying
the consensus model of democracy is inclusiveness, i.e. the part of the elector-
ate represented in government is as large as possible (Lundell 2011; Kaiser
et al. 2002). However, the better this criterion is met, the lower the clarity of
3
Jacques Thomassen
4
Representation and Accountability
5
Jacques Thomassen
A. Macro characteristics
of democratic systems
Majoritarian vs. consensual
Institutional quality
Policy performance
Clarity of responsibility
Polarization
(AC). Most of the research questions in this volume can only be answered by
taking into account one of these types of interaction.
6
Representation and Accountability
7
Jacques Thomassen
8
Representation and Accountability
9
Jacques Thomassen
10
Representation and Accountability
individuals becoming more prone to say that a party represents their views.
When perceptions of representation are taken into account the—modest—
relationship between PR and turnout loses its significance, i.e. proportional
representation has no direct, independent effect on electoral participation
once political attitudes are taken into account. In other words, the relation-
ship between PR and turnout is indeed mediated by individuals’ ability to
identify a party representing their views.
Chapter 7, by Weldon and Dalton, examines how democratic institutions
affect citizens’ political behaviour beyond the act of voting. The starting
point is again Lijphart’s presumption that consensual institutions incorpo-
rate more citizens into the electoral process and lessen political inequality,
because they give citizens effective voice and representation. This presump-
tion seems to imply that consensualism has spillover effects that stimulate
participation more broadly. However, in contrast to the effect of consensu-
alism on turnout, these further implications of consensualism have hardly
been examined and are not uncontested, not even at a theoretical level.
According to a competing view, consensualism may have the opposite
effect, actually decreasing citizen involvement beyond voting, precisely
because citizens already feel better represented through the electoral pro-
cess in these systems. In addition, majoritarian electoral systems tend to be
candidate-centred, with MPs elected from single-member districts. Because
of this, majoritarian systems offer greater incentives for participation
beyond voting, such as campaigning and contacting public officials. On the
second dimension of political institutions, the federal–unitary dimension,
federal systems may suppress voter turnout, because individual elections
are less critical, but they also offer more opportunities for participation at
the sub-national level than do unitary systems. Because elections occur
more often, civic organizations may stay stronger over time, helping to
mobilize and encourage non-voting forms of participation. These hypoth-
eses are corroborated by the empirical analysis. Participation in all other
political activities than voting is lower in consensual systems when opera-
tionalized on the basis of the executives–parties dimension—often mark-
edly so as in the case of campaign activity, persuading others how to vote,
and contacting a politician. In short, consensual systems seem to demobi-
lize citizen participation beyond casting a ballot. These correlations are
even more outspoken when only the electoral system is taken into account.
As shown in the previous chapter, a proportional electoral system might
encourage people how to vote, but it apparently discourages people from
showing their support during the campaign or trying to persuade others
how to vote. These patterns are unanticipated by the consensualism litera-
ture, which presumes that voting turnout is symptomatic of general involve-
ment in the political process.
11
Jacques Thomassen
12
Representation and Accountability
13
Jacques Thomassen
14
Representation and Accountability
citizens’ evaluations of regime procedures, i.e. their beliefs that human rights
are respected, their perceptions of corruption and the representation process,
are shaped by objective indicators of the quality of output institutions.
The alternative explanation that popular evaluations of regime procedures
are due to the ‘kinder, gentler’ consensus institutions that Lijphart envisioned
is hardly supported by the data. There is some evidence that citizens residing
in federal regimes are more likely to think that human rights are respected in
their country; and they also believe that corruption is lower. But all in all
there is fairly weak evidence in support of the idea that consensus systems
have more procedural integrity than majoritarian institutions.
15
Jacques Thomassen
and political leaders and therefore are becoming less satisfied with the func-
tioning of democracy.
The additional hypothesis tested in this chapter is that in consensus democ-
racies this effect will be subdued because one of the main characteristics of a
consensus democracy is that it is responsive to minority groups. Because of its
proportional electoral system, new political movements based on new con-
flict lines, such as globalization, have easy access to the process of political
representation.
The main hypotheses in this chapter are not borne out. Although in general
less-educated and less-skilled citizens do feel less well represented by any polit-
ical party and are less satisfied with the functioning of democracy, there is no
evidence for a differential development of these feelings: there is no growing
gap in this respect between the winners and losers of globalization. Since no
effect of globalization was found, this by definition means that the political-
institutional context is not relevant either.
Chapter 12, by Chang, Chu, and Wu, focuses on the well-known winner–
loser gap. Previous research has shown that among voters the losers of elec-
tions tend to be less satisfied with the functioning of democracy than the
winners. It has also been shown that this gap between winners and losers is
larger in majoritarian than in consensus democracies. In these previous stud-
ies electoral winners and losers are distinguished on the basis of a single elec-
tion and the interaction between winners and losers is treated as a one-shot
game. However, since elections in democracies are held routinely, winners
can become losers when electoral alternation occurs. In this chapter two con-
secutive elections are taken into account to define winners and losers. This
logically leads to four categories: two-time winners, two-time losers, winners-
losers, and losers-winners. In this chapter this distinction is connected to
Huntington’s two-turnover test in the comparative democratization litera-
ture. According to Huntington, a nascent democracy is considered consoli-
dated if it has experienced two peaceful electoral alternations. However, the
relevant literature on this subject consequently neglects the importance of
ordinary citizens’ democratic attitudes during electoral alternations in young
democracies. And yet, it is generally agreed that citizens’ attitudes towards
democracy are essential for the legitimacy and stability of democratic regimes,
in particular new democratic regimes. Therefore, this chapter, by examining
how citizens’ experience as winners or losers in successive elections influ-
ences their support for democracy is an important complement to the two-
turnover test literature. Because of their limited experience with democracy,
the expectation is that the gap between winners and losers will be larger in
developing than in established democracies.
The main hypothesis at the individual level in this chapter is that the
experience of having been a winner at least once is more likely to develop a
16
Representation and Accountability
17
Jacques Thomassen
18
Representation and Accountability
emocracies. Still, these findings are too preliminary to justify strong con-
d
clusions, the more so since we did not really (re)examine to what extent
the winner–loser gap is larger in majoritarian than in consensus democra-
cies. Nevertheless, by extending the definition of winners and losers to two
consecutive elections the final chapter seems to deliver strong support for
Lijphart’s initial argument that different societies ask for different political
institutions. If winners and losers do not regularly change places because
solid social cleavages always yield the same political majority, a majoritar-
ian system is disastrous for the legitimacy of the political system among
the (permanent) minority of the people (Lijphart 1984).
But the general conclusion of this volume is that formal political institu-
tions are less relevant for people’s attitudes and behaviour than often pre-
sumed. This is not to say that characteristics of the political system do not
matter. But rather than formal political institutions like the electoral system
it seems to be characteristics of the party system like polarization and the clar-
ity of responsibility that really matter. This is in line with the growing body
of empirical knowledge, mostly based on the Comparative Study of Electoral
Systems, on the relationship between aspects of the political system and the
attitudes and behaviour of individual citizens (Thomassen 2005b; Klinge-
mann 2009; Dalton et al. 2011a; Dalton and Anderson 2011).
This conclusion should be a lesson in modesty for institutional engineers.
If institutional differences have as little effect as this volume suggests, or if
their effects cancel out each other, institutional reforms based on the pre-
sumption that a change in institutions will improve the functioning of
democracy are doomed to lead to frustration among both the reformers and
the citizenry at large.
Notes
1. See <http://www.cses.org/>.
2. The following characterization of the two models of democracy is from Aarts and
Thomassen (2008a: 6–7).
3. This figure was first presented by Bernhard Wessels in 1998 at a CSES conference in
Berlin. Also, see Thomassen (2000) and Klingemann (2009).
19
2
2.1 Introduction
As the work of Arend Lijphart (1984, 1999, 2012) has impressively shown by
offering an empirical theory of democracy, a wide range of political-
institutional characteristics can be subsumed under the concepts of consen-
sus and majoritarian democracy. In a nutshell, the ideal types of consensus
and majoritarian democracy differ in the extent to which power is concen-
trated or shared in the political system. Using principal component analyses,
Lijphart (1999) uncovers two latent (sub-)dimensions of democracy, finding
what he labels an executives–parties dimension and a federal–unitary dimen-
sion. Each construct encompasses five politico-institutional variables. For
each of these, a manifestation on a spectrum from majoritarian to consensual
is possible. Consensus democracy ideally displays multiple parties, multipar-
ty government, a balance of power between executive and legislature, a pro-
portional electoral system, interest group corporatism, a federal structure,
bicameralism, judicial review, a rigid constitution, and an autonomous cen-
tral bank.
The empirical theory of democracy proposed by Lijphart (1999) has
received a fair share of criticism (see below), but given the complex empirical
variety of contemporary democracy, it is widely accepted as a useful concep-
tualization of democracy. The reductive character of the resulting empirical
dimensions of democracy, i.e. the reduction of the number of explanatory
variables in a meaningful way by connecting them to latent constructs, ren-
ders empirical examination of a variety of topics possible. In particular, it
facilitates the analysis of individual political representation, behaviour, and
attitudes under different political-institutional settings.
20
New Patterns of Democracy
The plan of the chapter is as follows. First, the discussion surrounding the
empirical theory of democracy presented by Lijphart (1999) is briefly reviewed
and the innovations of the study at hand are introduced. These include the
coverage of a different set of countries for the time period 1997–2006 and the
improvement of several single measurements.2 Two alternative sets of dimen-
sions of consensus and majoritarian democracy are presented. The first, two-
dimensional solution aims at comparability with Lijphart’s (1999) original
patterns and yields an executives–parties (covering party systems, electoral
disproportionality, cabinet type, and executive–legislative relations) dimen-
sion and a f ederal–unitary (covering constitutional federalism, fiscal decen-
tralization, bicameralism, and judicial review) dimension. It serves as a
baseline for comparison in the chapters to follow, analysing the role of con-
sensus democracy in the realm of representation. The second solution wid-
ens the theoretical scope of the original typology by introducing direct
democracy. The latter changes the expectation regarding the dimensional
structure of consensus democracy. Instead of two dimensions, the variables
should form three factors. Consensual types of direct democracy are hypoth-
esized to interact with cabinet type (Neidhart 1970), as governments are
more inclusive in the face of potential vetoes induced by (consensual) direct
democracy. In sum, we expect a reduced parties– elections dimension, a
federal–unitary dimension, and a new cabinets–direct democracy dimension
once direct democracy is introduced.
With the next step, we introduce the improved and extended dataset and
describe the design of the analysis. The data cover 35 of the 36 democratic
political systems which are represented in the second wave of the Compara-
tive Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). Complete information on 11 variables
between 1997 and 2006 has been assembled. These variables on the party
system, cabinet type, executive–legislative relations, electoral disproportion-
ality, federalism, decentralization, bicameralism, constitutional rigidity, judi-
cial review, central banks, and direct democracy are discussed in turn. Two
factor analyses on different sets of variables report the expected two- or three-
dimensional structure, with direct democracy forming a separate dimension
in conjunction with cabinet type and constitutional rigidity.
The new data allow innovative analyses of the relationship between major-
itarian/consensus democracy and political attitudes, political participation,
the quality of representation, and other relevant aspects of a functioning
democracy (see last chapters in Lijphart 1999). What is more, the develop-
ments in survey research and in the field of methodology offer new opportu-
nities to retest such relationships in a multilevel framework instead of
considering macro-level relationships only. Specifically, survey projects such
as the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems provide comparable individual-
level and country-level data. Adding to these observations the improved and
21
Julian Bernauer, Nathalie Giger, and Adrian Vatter
The typology proposed by Lijphart (1999) has received a fair share of criticism
(to name a few: Kaiser 1997; Bogaards 2000; Grofman 2000; Schmidt 2000;
Tsebelis 2002; Taagepera 2003; Ganghof 2005; Shikano 2006; Freitag and Vat-
ter 2008). This continues to inspire revisions of Lijphart’s (1999) empirical
theory, including improved measurements, in part encouraged by Lijphart
(2003: 20) himself (Keman 2000; Kaiser et al. 2002; De Winter 2005; Flinders
2005; Ganghof 2005; Schnapp and Harfst 2005). The toughest criticism comes
in both empirical and conceptual form. Conceptually, Ganghof (2005)
challenges Lijphart’s (1999) typology because it allegedly fails to distinguish
between institutions and behaviour. Taagepera (2003) questions the logical
and empirical connections between some of the indicators, such as interest
group corporatism and the first dimension, as well as central bank independ-
ence and the second dimension. Empirically, Shikano (2006: 76–8) replicates
the analysis of Lijphart (1999) using 2000 bootstrap samples and concludes
that three instead of two dimensions should have been taken into account.
Others challenge the selection of countries (Schmidt 2000: 348) or the exclu-
sion of direct democracy (Jung 1996, 2001). We remain within Lijphart’s (1999)
behavioural-institutional approach towards empirical patterns of democracy,
but taking on board some of the conceptual and empirical critiques.
In two journal articles, Vatter (2009) and Vatter and Bernauer (2009) have
presented improved measurements of the consensual and majoritarian fea-
tures of democracies. They carry out several changes to the original typology.
First, the time frame is more up-to-date compared to Lijphart (1999), ranging
from 1997 to 2006. Second, the selection of countries has been modified
according to the research question at hand. Vatter (2009) focuses on OECD
countries, while Vatter and Bernauer (2009) compare European Union mem-
ber states. Third, several measurements have been improved, including exec-
utive–legislative relations, cabinet type, and decentralization. Fourth, direct
democracy is incorporated into the typology. Direct democracy arguably is a
form of power-sharing in its own right (Vatter 2000; Jung 2001) with increas-
ing relevance. This goes beyond other research on direct democracy as it con-
nects it to the concept of consensus and majoritarian democracy (Hug and
Tsebelis 2002; Qvortrup 2002; LeDuc 2003; Setälä 2006) and is generally in
line with findings by Grofman (2000: 53), who provides evidence for an inde-
pendent third dimension of democracy, comprised of direct democracy alone.
22
New Patterns of Democracy
23
Julian Bernauer, Nathalie Giger, and Adrian Vatter
1
N= n
∑p
i=1
2
i
The measure weights the total number of parties by their strength in terms of
seats. It comes close to the raw number of parties when seat shares are distri
buted equally. The weighting avoids that relatively small parties are counted
as similarly relevant as relatively large ones.
Oversized and minority cabinets (cab): Consensual cabinet types are charac-
terized by power-sharing. Arguably, oversized multiparty cabinets and one- or
multiparty minority cabinets are consensual types. That leaves single- and
multiple-party minimal winning cabinets as the more majoritarian cabinet
formats. In contrast to Lijphart (1999), one-party minority cabinets are treat-
ed as fully consensual rather than majoritarian traits here, as all minority
cabinets have to share power to remain in office (De Winter 2005: 10). The
measure captures the share of oversized and minority coalitions for the time
period under investigation.
24
New Patterns of Democracy
1 n
G= ∑ (vi − si )2
2 i=1
25
Julian Bernauer, Nathalie Giger, and Adrian Vatter
Federalism (fed) and decentralization (dec): The first two variables on the second,
federal-unitary dimension are the constitutionally and fiscally federal or uni-
tary character of the political system. In Lijphart’s (1999) original specifica-
tion, the two aspects are merged into one factor. Lijphart’s (1999) variable
distinguishes constitutionally federal and unitary states, which are further
divided into centralized and decentralized subclasses. The coding implies that
constitutional federalism is more important than fiscal decentralization, as
centralized federal states are regarded as more consensual than decentralized
unitary ones. We suggest treating both federalism and decentralization as
aspects in their own right, following the distinction between the right to act
(decentralization) and the right to decide (federalism) (Keman 2000: 199). The
first variable refers to the constitutional division of power between levels of
government, ranging from 0 (no federalism) to 2 (strong federalism). The sec-
ond variable is the degree of fiscal decentralization (Lijphart 1984: 178; Cas-
tles 1999; Keman 2000). It measures the leeway during implementation that
state and local governments have as opposed to federal governments. The
share of local and state taxes in total tax revenue is used for this purpose.
Bicameralism (bic): Another variable that logically belongs to the federal-
unity dimension is the bi- or unicameral character of the political system.
Federal and decentralized systems are often complemented by a second
chamber with varying degrees of power. Following Lijphart (1999: 211ff.),
unicameral and bicameral systems are distinguished, with a further quali-
fication of bicameral systems. The most consensual type corresponds to
systems with second chambers at power parity with the first chamber and
partisan incongruence between chambers. Slightly less consensual are
chambers with asymmetric power and partisan incongruence or symmet-
ric power and partisan congruence, while systems with power asymmetry
between chambers and partisan congruence are classified as the most mod-
est form of bicameralism. The index ranges from a majoritarian 1 to a
consensual 4.
Constitutional rigidity (const): Additional features of power-sharing are locat-
ed in the constitution, the judicial system, and the central bank system. Con-
stitutional rigidity refers to the difficulty of changes of the constitution.
A five-point scale, following Lundell and Karvonen (2003), is used to meas-
ure this aspect of democracy. The most majoritarian configurations occur
when the constitution can be changed by a simple majority in parliament.
Intermediate rules require elections or referendums in addition to simple
majorities, qualified majorities, or a combination of qualified majorities with
referendums. The most consensual configurations foresee, for example, the
combination of several rounds of qualified majorities in parliament with a
referendum.
26
New Patterns of Democracy
Judicial review (jud): Judicial courts can be powerful veto players. The meas-
ure of the strength of judicial review ranges from the absence of judicial review
to strong judicial review. A three-category scale of the degree to which laws
can be reviewed by a constitutional court is used. The most majoritarian form
is no or weak judicial review, medium-strength judicial review represents an
intermediate configuration, and strong judicial review the most consensual
trait.
Central bank independence (cent): One of the more controversial variables in
Lijphart’s (1999) selection is central bank independence. Critics argue that it
has no logical connection to the rest of the variables of the federal–unitary
dimension (Taagepera 2003: 12). The empirical analysis below will reveal
more on this issue. The Central Bank Independence (CBI) index, developed
by Cukierman et al. (1992), consists of 16 weighted items which cover the
independence of central banks in the areas of the chief executive officer, pol-
icy formulation, the objectives of the central bank, and limitations on lend-
ing to the government. Higher scores indicate more independent, consensual
central banks.
Consensual direct democracy (dir): The final variable is completely new to the
typology of consensus and majoritarian democracy proposed by Lijphart
(1999). As argued above, direct democracy should be included in a typology
of consensual and majoritarian democracy. The scale ranges from absence of
consensual direct democracy to pronounced consensual direct democracy. It
considers both the forms and the use of consensual direct democracy. Vatter
and Bernauer (2009: 346) explain the index:
The index compiled contains points for the degree of consensualism in the direct
democratic provisions in the constitution and embodied in the decision rules as
well as for the actual use of direct democracy. For those which we have labelled
‘uncontrolled’ referendums, i.e. optional referendums and initiatives, 1 point
each was awarded if prescribed by the constitution. No points were counted for
plebiscites (ad hoc referendums), which are subject to the discretion of the head
of government. As an intermediate form, 0.5 points were given for mandatory
referendums. Turning to decision rules, 0.5 points were awarded for each variant
of direct democracy when a quorum of participation is required and 1 point when
a qualified majority is required. Finally, 1 point was awarded for the actual use of
mandatory referendums, optional referendums and popular initiatives, but not
for plebiscites.
27
Julian Bernauer, Nathalie Giger, and Adrian Vatter
28
New Patterns of Democracy
Note: Principal factor analysis performed; factors with eigenvalues over 1.0 extracted; varimax orthogonal rotation;
factor loadings above 0.3 reported, loadings above 0.5 bold. Russia and Taiwan excluded. Central bank independ-
ence excluded from the final analysis as it does not load significantly on any dimension; constitutional rigidity exclud-
ed from the final analysis as loadings split between dimensions.
electoral disproportionality with the expected signs. The only variable miss-
ing compared to Lijphart (1999) is corporatism. The federal–unitary dimen-
sion (first in Table 2.1) shares federalism (which has been split here to
explicitly measure constitutional federalism and fiscal decentralization),
bicameralism, and judicial review with Lijphart’s (1999) findings. Central
bank independence did not load substantively on any dimension, while
constitutional rigidity had its loadings split between dimensions. Both vari-
ables have been excluded from the final factor analysis. The second factor
analysis expands Lijphart’s (1999) universe of political-institutional features
and incorporates direct democracy (Table 2.2).
Note: Principal factor analysis performed; factors with eigenvalues over 1.0 extracted; varimax orthogonal rotation;
factor loadings above 0.3 reported, loadings above 0.5 bold. Russia and Taiwan excluded. Central bank independ-
ence excluded from the final analysis as it does not load significantly on any dimension.
29
Julian Bernauer, Nathalie Giger, and Adrian Vatter
Vatter (2009) and Vatter and Bernauer (2009) have introduced direct
democracy as an additional variable, and hypothesize that it constitutes a
third dimension of consensus democracy in combination with cabinet type.
We found some support for the hypothesis for OECD and (Western) EU coun-
tries. In the CSES sample of 34 countries analysed here, these patterns are
generally also supported by the factor analysis (see Factor 3 in Table 2.2);
however, constitutional rigidity also loads on the dimension. The eigenval-
ues are 2.20, 1.65, 1.07, and 0.60 for the first four factors. A screeplot (not
reported) confirms the considerable drop in the score of the eigenvalue after
the third factor. Hence, while the third factor is retained with limited confi-
dence, we are far away from a four-dimensional solution. An alternative esti-
mation using oblique rotation with the promax criterion (allowing dimensions
to be correlated) does not change the pattern of which variables load most
strongly on which dimension, while the loadings change marginally. These
changes seldom exceed 0.01–0.03 for the loadings of interest, with the excep-
tion of constitutional rigidity with changes up to 0.12 but still has its strong-
est loading on the third factor. The three-dimensional finding is remarkably
robust against the specification of the rotation method. In sum, we take these
results as an encouragement to accept the three-dimensional solution, but
also as a reminder that factor analytical solutions can be somewhat
arbitrary.
We have labelled the new third dimension cabinets–direct democracy. The
other two factors (1 and 2) largely resemble the dimensions found by
Lijphart (1999); the executives–parties (featuring party, exeleg, and elec, but
not cab) and the federal–unitary (featuring fed, dec, bic, and jud) dimension
(again in reversed order). As cabinet type is not primarily loading on the
former dimension, it is labelled parties–elections to distinguish it from
Lijphart’s (1999) executives–parties dimension. Exceptions from the pat-
terns found by Lijphart on the second dimension are central bank inde-
pendence as well as constitutional rigidity. In particular, central bank
independence does not load even modestly on any of the three dimensions
and is excluded from the final factor analysis. This backs up Taagepera’s
(2003) criticism that it constitutes a rather alien element in the set of varia-
bles. Policy convergence caused by the European Central Bank in the Euro-
pean Union further reduces variance on the variable. We therefore
recommend leaving it out in the computation of indices. A more compli-
cated case is constitutional rigidity. Constitutional rigidity has its loadings
split between the first and the third factors, with clearly stronger attach-
ment to the third. While we did not see theoretical reasons connecting con-
stitutional rigidity to the first dimension, it might be reasonable to expect
more amendable institutions where direct democracy is strong. According
to Lijphart (1999), it logically belongs to the second dimension. Given the
30
New Patterns of Democracy
DEU
USA
2
CAN
BRA CHE
MEX
Federal-unitary dimension
1
AUS
RUS BEL
POL
ESP DNK
PHL
FRA JPN ITA
0
HUN CZEROU SVN
KOR CHI
BUL SWE
NLD ISR FIN
–1 GBR IRL ISL
PRT NOR
ALB PER
NZL
–2
–2 –1 0 1 2
Executives-parties dimension
Figure 2.1. Map of democracy using indices of variables loading on the dimensions of
consensus democracy (two-dimensional solution). High values indicate consensus
democracy. The country labels are centred on the scores of the countries. ALB: Albania,
AUS: Australia, BEL: Belgium, BRA: Brazil, BUL: Bulgaria, CAN: Canada, CHE: Switzer-
land, CHL: Chile, CZE: Czech Republic, DEU: Germany, DNK: Denmark, ESP: Spain,
FIN: Finland, FRA: France, GBR: Great Britain, HUN: Hungary, IRL: Ireland, ISL: Iceland,
ISR: Israel, ITA: Italy, JPN: Japan, KOR: South Korea, MEX: Mexico, NLD: Netherland,
NOR: Norway, NZL: New Zealand, PER: Peru, PHL: Philippines, POL: Poland, PRT: Por-
tugal, ROU: Romania, RUS: Russia, SVN: Slovenia, SWE: Sweden, USA: United States.
31
Julian Bernauer, Nathalie Giger, and Adrian Vatter
DEU
USA
2
CAN
CHE BRA
MEX
Federal-unitary dimension
1
AUS
RUS BEL
ESP
POL DNK
PHL
FRA ITA
0 JPN
SVN
HUN ROU CZE
KOR CHI SWE
BUL FIN NLD
ISR
–1 GBR IRL ISL
PRT
NOR
ALB PER
NZL
–2
–2 –1 0 1 2
Parties-elections dimension
Figure 2.2. Map of democracy using indices of variables loading on the dimensions
of consensus democracy (three-dimensional solution). High values indicate consensus
democracy. Larger circles indicate more consensual traits on the third, cabinets–direct
democracy dimension. The country labels are centred on the scores of the countries.
Country labels, see Figure 2.1.
32
New Patterns of Democracy
1999: 255) would need fully comparable data over time. The purpose of
this database is rather to provide tailor-made measures to complement the
CSES 2 data, with a focus on measurement validity and data availability.
Some countries appear on the map for the first time, including Albania
(rather majoritarian on both the federal–unitary and executives–parties
dimension), South Korea (rather majoritarian on the executives–parties
dimension), and Mexico (taking a central position).
The inclusion of direct democracy into the set of political-institutional fea-
tures yields a third, cabinets–direct democracy dimension and a slightly
altered map of democracy (Figure 2.2). As cabinet type is detached from the
first dimension, which is consequently renamed into parties–elections
dimension, the positions of countries change slightly. The cabinets–direct
democracy dimension (shown using bubbles of different size) provides addi-
tional information about consensus democracy shaped by direct democracy,
cabinet type, and constitutional rigidity. We observe that countries like Swit-
zerland, Denmark, Italy, and several post-communist democracies (e.g. Hun-
gary, Albania, and Poland) display consensual traits on this new dimension,
while others such as Germany, the United States, and in particular Great Brit-
ain are more majoritarian.
Both the two- and the three-dimensional solutions share core variables in
the first two dimensions, but each variant has a slightly different notion. In
any case, having the choice between measures of consensus democracy with
or without direct democracy should enrich our understanding of consensus
and majoritarian democracy and allow a more flexible use of the concepts,
depending on the research interest at hand.
2.4 Conclusion
33
Julian Bernauer, Nathalie Giger, and Adrian Vatter
34
Appendix A.2.1. Eleven political-institutional variables, their measurement, and data sources
1) Party system: two-party Effective number of legislative parties: Laakso Armingeon et al. 2006; Armingeon and Careja 2004; Gallagher and
systems vs multiparty systems and Taagepera (1979) index (1–∞) Mitchell 2008; Golder 2005; Norris 2002; Reilly 2007a Comparative
Study of Electoral Systems; own calculations based on online databases1
2) Cabinet type: one-party Share of oversized and minority cabinets Armingeon et al. 2006; Armingeon and Careja 2004; Bale and Van Biezen
cabinets and minimal winning (0–1) 2007; Katz 2003; Katz and Koole 1999, 2002; Koole and Katz 1998, 2000,
coalitions vs oversized and 2001; Van Biezen and Katz 2004, 2005, 2006; own calculations based on
minority coalitions online databases1
3) Executive–legislative relationship: Modified version of Siaroff’s (2003) Siaroff 2003; own expert survey for non-EU/OECD countries; USA,
executive dominance vs executive– 11-element index of executive dominance Switzerland and Eastern Europe: own calculations based on documentary
legislative power balance (0–18), omitting type of electoral system and analysis2
influence of committee members on parties
4) Electoral system: disproportional Gallagher index of disproportionality (0–100) Armingeon et al. 2006; Armingeon and Careja 2004; Gallagher and
vs proportional electoral systems Mitchell 2008; Lundell and Karvonen 2003; Reilly 2007b own calculations
based on online databases1
5) Federalism: unitarism vs Degree of constitutional federalism (0–2) Armingeon et al. 2006; Armingeon and Careja 2004; Lundell and
9) Judicial review: absence of Scale of the degree to which laws can be Armingeon et al. 2006; Lundell and Karvonen 2003; Roberts 2006; Siaroff
judicial review vs strong judicial reviewed by a constitutional court (0–2) 2005
review
10) Central bank independence: Cukierman index of central bank Cukierman et al. 1992; Cukierman et al. 2002; Sadeh 2005, 2006;
absence of central banks vs independence, incl. European Central Bank additional sources4
independent central banks (0–1)
11) Direct democracy: absence of Scale of the forms and use of consensual Own calculations based on data from the Centre for Research on Direct
consensual direct democracy vs direct democracy (0–9.5); see Vatter (2009) Democracy, Zurich; the Electoral Knowledge Network; Institute for
pronounced consensual direct Democracy and Electoral Assistance; Initiative and Referendum Institute
democracy Asia5
Notes
1. The compilation of the database would not have been possible without the help
of Jonas Ertlmaier and Steffen Hurka. Earlier data sets have been collected with the
help of Jens Clasen, Ralph Wenzel, Rainer Stocker, and Stefanie Rall. We would
like to thank several members of the scientific community, including Alex Cukier-
man, Jessica Fortin, Timothy Frye, Joshua A. Tucker, and Tal Sadeh, for valuable
advice and generous access to data, and the numerous respondents of an expert
survey on executive–legislative relations.
2. Note that Lijphart (2012) provides temporal updates of Lijphart (1999), but with-
out significant changes to operationalizations or the sample.
3. This does not mean that we expect the complete absence of a relationship between
cabinet type and the elements of the parties-elections dimension. Future research
might well split cabinet type between the two dimensions.
4. The description of the measurement of single variables strongly draws on Vatter
and Bernauer (2009).
5. The index is developed for the comparison of parliamentary systems. For presi-
dential systems, most but not all items of the index apply, such as the power of the
prime minister. There is no clear answer to the question whether presidential sys-
tems have more powerful legislatures than parliamentary systems (Alonso and
Ruiz-Rufino 2007: 241). The exact consideration of the power of the president in
the index is an issue for further research, as well as the role of presidentialism in
the Lijphartian framework in general.
6. For some countries, responses on a small number of additional items are missing.
The additive index of executive dominance was reweighted using the number of
valid indicators for the countries with missing values in order to have a compara-
ble range of the index across different degrees of coverage.
7. Interest group corporatism is only available for the 26 advanced democracies. For
a factor analysis of 12 political-institutional variables in 26 advanced democra-
cies, including interest group corporatism, see the codebook of Vatter and Ber-
nauer (2010a).
8. With Russia, the value of the third factor drops just below 1, with similar loadings
of the variables.
9. Strictly speaking, factor analysis requires variables with interval levels of measure-
ment (Kim and Mueller 1978: 73). The ordinal variables in the data set do not meet
this requirement; and we have to assume that they are quasi-continuous. Gener-
ally, correlations are robust and can accommodate ordinal variables (De Vaus: 385).
10. Rotation using the varimax criterion causes the factors to be rotated in such a
fashion that the variance of the squared loadings per factor is maximized.
11. Alternative methodologies beyond the scope of this chapter and much farther
away from Lijphart’s (1999, 2012) original methodology but worth future investi-
gation include Bayesian factor analytical and item response theoretical methods,
which have a number of advantages such as the accommodation of both continu-
ous and ordinal variables and the acknowledgement of measurement error (Quinn
2004; Treier and Jackman 2008).
37
3
3.1 Introduction
38
Meaningful Choices: Does Parties’ Supply Matter?
However, why should this be the case? Lijphart puts forward ten criteria rang-
ing from characteristics of party systems to those of central banks to differenti-
ate consensus from majoritarian democracies, but these do not offer an
explanation. Also, his chapter on electoral systems does not provide theoretical
insights concerning this question. It is not only self-evident but normatively
required that elections play the pivotal role in this regard. Therefore, one pos-
sible explanation could be that elections are more meaningful in consensus
than in majoritarian democracies. Meaningfulness implies at least two charac-
teristics: political supply should offer real choices in terms of different substance
and election results should translate into a distribution of seats and govern-
ment responsibility corresponding with the political ‘bias’ of the election
results.
That these are a natural characteristic of elections has been challenged in
the recent debates about the quality of democracy. The question arising from
these debates is about the ‘meaningfulness of “democratic elections”’ (Merkel
2004: 34). Introduced in the context of political representation studies some
30 years ago (Dalton 1985), this question is once again being addressed in
new approaches towards measures of democracy (Hadenius and Teorell 2005)
and empirical analyses of democratization processes (Lindberg 2006). Mean-
ingful elections are about the ‘control of the agenda’, i.e. that the demos or
people must have the opportunity to decide what political matters actually
are and what should be brought up for deliberation (Dahl 1989: 107).
At a general level, meaningful elections require at least three things: a) that
the institutional setting translates, in an appropriate way, vote distributions
into political power and policymaking, b) that election results are an indica-
tion of a political mandate with the respective political bias which implies
that political supply offers real and substantive alternatives, and, last but not
least, c) that voters make a reasonable choice between substantively different
policy packages at stake in elections.
In this chapter, an attempt is made to answer the question of under which
conditions elections are most meaningful by looking at the contribution of
institutions (point a), the supply side of politics (point b), and the demand
side (point c). Emphasis is placed on the conditions under which voters can
base their choices on proximity considerations. This is a core aspect in the
idea of ‘elections as an instrument of democracy’ (Powell 2000), because vot-
ing according to the match in political positions of a voter and a party or a
politician is exactly what democratic mandating implies and a properly work-
ing process of democratic representation demands. In this sense, this chapter
is an attempt to complement Lijphart’s perspective with choice-related pre-
requisites of a working democratic process.
39
Bernhard Wessels and Hermann Schmitt
The factors that could explain the degree to which elections and choices are
meaningful are manifold and located in different dimensions of a political
system. One strand of the discussion on meaningful elections argues from an
institutional perspective. Lijphart puts emphasis on the impact of the type of
democracy, i.e. the type of institutional setting, on the quality of representa-
tion. His central claim is that proportional and, even more, consensus democ-
racies perform better regarding policy performance in the public-good arena.
Thus, elections may be regarded as more meaningful in proportional political
systems and, in particular, consensus democracies.
A second strand lays emphasis on political actors. From this point of view, it is
important that actors (in the first instance parties, but also candidates) offer
meaningful choices in order to make elections meaningful for citizens. Mean-
ingfulness includes that there are choices, i.e. real differences between the
offered policies, and that these policies are regarded as viable, i.e. realistic enough
to be implemented, and the respective actors as capable of implementing them.
These two perspectives, that institutions matter or that actors matter, are
not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, a given set of institutions has impli-
cations for the structure of political competition and, thus, for the shape of
the party system and political-supply structures.
The mechanisms working behind the scenes—securing the link between
citizens and their representatives as well as their governments—can be best
described in terms of the responsible party model (RPM). Thomassen has
pointed out the following conditions on the supply side (Thomassen 1994):
political parties must present different policy alternatives to the voters and
the internal cohesion, or party discipline, of parliamentary parties must be
strong enough to enable them to implement their policy programme (condi-
tion 1 of the RPM). The prerequisites on the supply side are useless when they
are not met by the following prerequisites to be fulfilled at the demand side:
voters must have policy issue preferences (condition 2); they have to be aware
of the policy positions of parties (condition 3); they have to compare their
own position with those of the parties (condition 4); and they have to vote for
the party closest to representing their policy preferences (condition 5) (Pierce
1999: 9). Thus, all in all, the responsible party model demands that party rep-
resentatives develop their manifestos and try to realize the promises they
have made there (Schattschneider 1977) while voters choose accordingly.
40
Meaningful Choices: Does Parties’ Supply Matter?
position of the median voter’ and ‘the percentage of voters between govern-
ment and the median citizen’ are smaller in consensus than in majoritarian
democracies (see also Huber and Powell 1994).
This implies either that voters vote more according to their proximity to
political parties or candidates in consensus democracies or that political sup-
ply structures allow a higher proximity to voter groups in consensus than in
majoritarian democracies. The explanation for this is the following. In a
majoritarian one-party government, the median of the party most likely is
not at the median voter. The party may include the median voter. Otherwise
it would not be the party in government. In consensus democracies the domi-
nant form of government is a coalition. If the parties of a coalition are at the
median of their party voters, and their party voters have gained a majority,
the likelihood that the median position of one of the parties is closer to the
overall median voter is higher than in case of a one-party government in a
two-party system.
What are the mechanisms behind the characteristics Lijphart uses to distin-
guish these two types of political systems? His conceptual map of democracy
consists of two dimensions. One is the executive–parties dimension, the other
the federal–unitary dimension. The latter is hardly related to political parties,
competition, and governments and will thus be neglected in our analysis. The
executive–parties dimension accounts for the effective number of parlia
mentary parties, the existence of minimal winning one-party cabinets, execu-
tive dominance, electoral disproportionality, and interest-group pluralism
(Lijphart 1999: 241–50). The first four characteristics are related to elections
and their outcomes, which is obvious except for the executive dominance.
Executive dominance, however, measures cabinet durability, which should
depend on election outcomes in democracies. How these four elements con-
tribute to proximity and, thus, representation is not discussed by Lijphart, but
general arguments are easy to find. Starting with the simplest one, propor-
tionality of an electoral system stands for the degree of distortion in the trans-
lation of votes into seats. The more proportional, the better the will of the
voters translates into the distribution of political power, and the more likely
sincere voting according to preferences. The effective number of political par-
ties is an indicator of the differentiation of political supply and, therefore, the
number of choices that are reasonable. Both elements are positively correlat-
ed with consensus democracy, whereas one-party governments and longer
cabinet duration are related to majoritarian democracies. In a very general
way, the executive–parties dimension is a measure of the structure of political
competition (centrifugal vs centripetal) as well as of the differentiation of
viable political parties and the rigidity of the electoral system.
A hypothesis on the effect of proximity voting as one possible determinant
of proximity between representatives and those being represented based on
41
Bernhard Wessels and Hermann Schmitt
42
Meaningful Choices: Does Parties’ Supply Matter?
Dahl has emphasized the choice aspect as a precondition for democracy and
democratic participation (Dahl 1971). If there is no choice, elections cannot
function democratically.
For a meaningful choice-set, nominally different choice options are not
sufficient. In addition, those options need to differ in content, because
elections are the means by which citizens collectively decide about the
political agenda to be pursued, the policies to be enacted, and the people
who should be in charge of this. An ideal democratic election provides a
substantive choice between competing policy proposals or political agen-
das. In normative terms, this is the most relevant dimension of elections.
In a meaningful choiceset, the available options differ with regard to the
policies the parties would pursue if they were to be in charge of government
after the election.
On the side of the voters, a sense of what they want to see established as
future policies is necessary in order to be able to evaluate the offers by
political parties, i.e. they must have preferences (condition 2 of RPM). Sec-
ond, they have to establish an expectation on the likely policy of each of
the available choice options. The yardstick for this can be retrospective or
prospective. Retrospectively, voters establish a sense of the course of future
policies on the basis of their experience with the course of past policies (Key
1966; Fiorina 1977). Prospectively, they look at the offers of the parties in
the election campaign. Prospective evaluations of the likely policies of dif-
ferent choice options can only rely on statements of intention as laid down
in election manifestos and other campaign material. Because voting is
about who will govern the people in the future, vote decisions regularly
build on the judgement of statements of intention (prospective) corrected
by retrospective evaluations in order to assess the reliability of an actor’s
offer. This is certainly a rather demanding task in terms of information
gathering and processing. As programme parties offer whole bundles of
issues, this task is even more demanding. Voters have to find a yardstick
that allows them to sum up and choose. From research on electoral behav-
iour it is known that voters use cues and shortcuts in order to reduce the
complexity of political life and choice options. One of the most powerful
cues and general criteria of differentiation between choice options is ideol-
ogy. Differences between concrete policy issues quite often relate to more
general approaches and strategic visions of politics, i.e. ideology. Therefore,
ideology is understood to serve as a proxy for policy in many theories of the
voting decision (Downs 1957). If there are differences between policy
options and voters have policy positions, they will be able to check the cor-
respondence between their demands and the political supply. The better
these conditions are met, the more likely it is that voters express this match
by their respective vote.
43
Bernhard Wessels and Hermann Schmitt
44
Meaningful Choices: Does Parties’ Supply Matter?
45
Bernhard Wessels and Hermann Schmitt
left and right (Klingemann et al. 2006: Chapters 1 and 4). However, this is not
sufficient. The voters must also be able to relate concrete policy options to a
general dimension like the overarching left–right schema. Whether this is the
case or not is investigated in the next section. Here, we concentrate on the
question of whether parties offer choices that are constrained by more gen-
eral dimensions.
For CSES 2 countries, the most recent data of the MARPOR project cover
177 election programmes of 23 countries, with 56 standard policy issues
coded by the project. For a dimensional analysis, 177 cases (party platforms)
on 56 issues would not result in reliable solutions (Costello and Osborne
2005). Thus, dimensions are extracted by means of factor analysis for each of
the policy domains, covering: 1. External relations; 2. Freedom and democ-
racy; 3. Political system; 4. Economy; 5. Welfare and quality of life; 6. Fabric
of society; and 7. Social groups (Klingemann et al. 2006: Appendix II, 186–90).
The number of policy categories across these domains ranges from 4 to 16.
For each domain, a factor analysis has been done separately. The criterion
for the selection of a factor as indicative of a generalized approach to policies
is an eigenvalue larger than 1. Applying this criterion, 14 factors can be
extracted covering five policy domains: 1. External relations; 2. Freedom and
democracy; 4. Economy; 5. Welfare and quality of life; and 6. Fabric of society.
Domain 3 (Political system) and domain 7 (Social groups) did not produce
factors meeting the criterion. The number of factors extracted per domain var-
ies from one (domain 2) to four (domain 4). Results are displayed in Table 3.1.
The result shows, on the one hand, that there is not a single dimension like
the super-issue left–right on which the policies can be projected perfectly. On
the other hand, the factor solution can easily be interpreted in terms of con-
tent. We only considered factor loadings of at least 0.5 for interpretation (see
Table 3.1).
That the factor solution is not unidimensional, however, does not imply
that the found policy domains do not relate to the most important ideologi-
cal dimension in politics, namely the left–right scheme. One may have some
informed prejudices about how the policy categories should relate to left–
right. The respective expectation is displayed in the last column of Table 3.1.
These expectations have been checked against the deductively derived left–
right score of the Party Manifesto Project by regressing it on the 14 factor
scores resulting in explained variance of the deductive left–right scale of 69
per cent, which supports the expected relationship. The policy categories
derived are obviously related to the general left–right dimension, thus leav-
ing the chance for voters to respecify what parties offer in policy terms in the
election campaign on the left–right dimension.
Thus, do voters’ perceptions meet with what the finding on election plat-
forms of parties suggests? The left–right schema is a moving target regarding
46
Meaningful Choices: Does Parties’ Supply Matter?
Factor domain N of items Factor Factor content (criterion: Expl. var. Cumul. Hyp. LR
factor loading ≥ 0.5)
its content. It is continually adjusted and new issues and policies are respeci-
fied in terms of left and right soon after they occur. ‘This adjustment is made
possible by a gradual integration of new elements in the established meaning
repertoire of left and right, and the disappearance of elements that have
become irrelevant in competition for power and policy direction. Such a
change of meaning elements can be understood as a function of changes in
(a) their salience and (b) their alignment with one or the other side of the
struggle for political power’ (Van der Eijk and Schmitt 2010).
The basic assumption of Van der Eijk and Schmitt is that if voters use the
left–right schema for evaluating and sorting out the political supply of politi-
cal parties and are aware of the more specific policy offers of the political par-
ties, they would respecify these in terms of left and right in order to make
sense of them. Van der Eijk and Schmitt are realistic enough not to assume
that citizens actually care about election platforms of political parties: ‘While
we focus on parties’ public political pronouncements, and in particular on
the contents of their election manifestos, we do not believe that manifestos
are important as direct sources of information: citizens normally do not read
47
Bernhard Wessels and Hermann Schmitt
48
Meaningful Choices: Does Parties’ Supply Matter?
Note: Number of observations = 147,674; F (14, 31,202) = 213,251; Prob > F = 0.0000; Root MSE = 2.6256 (Std. err.
adjusted for 31,203 clusters in id).
49
Bernhard Wessels and Hermann Schmitt
50
Meaningful Choices: Does Parties’ Supply Matter?
0,80
0,76
Adj. R-squared; regression of LR on Party Programms 0,72
0,70 0,66
0,63 0,64
0,57 0,59
0,60
0,52 0,53
0,50
0,50
0,43
0,38 0,38 0,39
0,40
0,33 0,34
0,29
0,30
0,22
0,18 0,20 0,20
0,20
0,10 0,05
0,03
0,00
ROU KOR ITA USA AUS SVN IRE DEU NZE BGR FIN FRA POL PRT CHE NOR NLD DNK HUN ESP PRT SWE CZE
Figure 3.1. Clarity of policy positions of political parties: R2, regression of perception
of parties’ left–right positions on 14 factor scales from election manifestos
How much influence can proximity exert on voting, and does this influence
vary across contexts? This is the basic question, and its relevance for voters’
mandate to parties by elections is obvious. Thus, the question here is: Under
which conditions are elections meaningful with regard to two aspects: pro-
viding voters with the opportunity to choose among clearly presented alter-
natives, and providing a substantive mandate for the party or parties elected
regarding the content the election result carries?
Results so far indicate that the conditions for meaningful choices may be
better than the critics of contemporary democracy would suggest. One indi-
cation is that there is differentiation of political supply as expressed in the
election platforms; a second is that the overwhelming majority of voters take
generalized political positions. A third consideration is that political offers at
election times as expressed in election manifestos may not be too complex
and/or remote from citizens’ perceptions because citizens may generalize
from rather specific proposals and policy categories to the abstract left–right
scheme in a rather reasonable way.
The hypotheses arising from these observations are straightforward. One
refers to general features of a political system, namely the degree of consensus
51
Bernhard Wessels and Hermann Schmitt
democracy; the second to the specific political supply offered in election cam-
paigns; a third to expected differences in the effect of the institutional and
the supply characteristics.
Lijphart has found that the left–right distance between voters and govern-
ments is smaller in consensus than in majoritarian systems. He gives little to
no specific argument or reason why that should be the case. From his approach
to political systems and his arguments, however, one may assume that this
has to do with the formal structure of the party system and governments as
an expression of the differentiation of political choices. This argument would
be in line with his more normative inspired claim that consensus democra-
cies are better suited for political representation because of their goal to rep-
resent the many and not only the majority. Because differentiation of political
supply provides the chance of more proximate choices, we may expect a
larger impact of proximity perceptions on the vote in more differentiated
supply structures. The hypothesis is as follows:
H1: In more consensual political systems, proximity between a voter’s left–right
position and the perceived left–right positions of political parties plays a more
important role than in majoritarian systems.
The third hypothesis relates to the differences in the strength of the effects of
the two context characteristics for proximity on the vote. Because the institu-
tional or structural characteristics of consensus democracy are not related to
policy content, but are an expression of the general degree of differentiation
of political supply, the viability of the structural alternatives, and strategic
bias demanded in the choice situation, the impact of consensus democracy
on the strength of proximity considerations for voting and its effect should
be limited. Compared to the moderating effect of Lijphart’s Consensus scale,
the moderating effect of clarity of policy positions of political parties should
be stronger.
As our hypotheses are formulated conditionally and we are interested to
know under which macro conditions choice sets are more (or less) meaningful,
52
Meaningful Choices: Does Parties’ Supply Matter?
the unconditioned results, i.e. the individual-level only model, are of no great
interest here. The question of conditional effects is a multilevel question. As
Franzese has put it: Researchers looking at the interaction of individual-level
and macro-level factors—in our case, how consensus democracy and political-
supply characteristics interact with individual-level determinants—are actually
not interested in the constant and micro-level effects on vote choice as such
(Franzese 2005). Thus, the model includes cross-level interactions between
proximity—that is, the closeness between a voters’ left–right self-placement
and her perception of the parties’ positions on the left–right scale—and the
consensus democracy scale and the clarity of policy positions measure. Fur-
thermore, in order to estimate the effect for all parties simultaneously, a stacked
data matrix is used. An individual appears in the data set as often as the choice
options. This allows for a binary model of vote choice. Because the data matrix
is stacked, the logistic model has to account for that. This implies a conditional
logistic regression model, which controls for the fact that an individual appears
as often as the choice options, and for the fact that standard errors are clus-
tered by samples, i.e. countries. Furthermore, the regression coefficients do not
tell much about the variation across contexts, i.e. across the macro variables
introduced in the interactions. In order to evaluate the variation of marginal
effects across contexts, we estimate the average marginal effect of proximity
across the values of the macro variables. Because a binary model is used, simple
linear forms of estimation as proposed by Brambor, Clark and Golder (2006)
cannot be used, but logistic ones. The basis of the conditional logistic regres-
sion model is a rather parsimonious voting model. It includes the spatial com-
ponent of proximity, a measure of partisanship, and an evaluative measure of
representation. For proximity left–right is used as already mentioned. For par-
tisanship, party like–dislike scales are used instead of party identification. The
reason is to take into account the variation in partisanship regarding all choice
options. This would not be possible with party identification. Party identifica-
tion in the stacked data matrix would be a variable with a binary outcome: one
for the party identified with, zero for all others. In order to take into account
the variation in party differentials, party like–dislike scales are used. The evalu-
ative measure regards the representational performance of parties. It carries
the information whether respondents identify one particular party by which
they feel represented.
The two latter measures can be regarded as simple controls because the
variable of interest here is proximity; more specific the variation of the effect
of proximity on vote choice conditioned by the clarity of political supply in
a party system.
Table 3.3, left panel, shows the results. However, our conditional hypothe-
ses concern the moderating effect of macro variables for the micro–micro
relationship between proximity and vote choice. We performed models with
53
Bernhard Wessels and Hermann Schmitt
Table 3.3. Conditional logistic regressions: base model and cross-level interactions
54
Meaningful Choices: Does Parties’ Supply Matter?
unit of the independent variable varies across contexts. For 23 countries and
ten possible one-point changes in probabilities for the ten-point proximity
scale this implies 230 different estimates. In order to reduce this complexity,
average marginal effects over the 23 contexts have been estimated in order to
determine in which contexts a change in probability by a one-point change
in the independent variable, proximity, is statistically significant. This infor-
mation is used to judge the four measures in change in probability of vote
choice by an increase in proximity between a respondent’s left–right self-
placement and the perceived party position on the left–right scale. The four
measures of change in probability are: a) the mean change in probability over
the range of the proximity scale for one-unit change, i.e. between 1 and zero,
2 and 1, until 10 to 9; b) mean changes in probability looking only to values
above the midpoint of the scale, starting with the difference between 6 and
5; c) mean change in probability between 9 and 8 and 10 and 9; and d) change
in probability between 10 and 9.
How do the two contextual variables, i.e. the degree of consensus democ-
racy and the degree of clarity of parties’ policy positions, moderate the impact
of proximity on the vote? The hypotheses formulated above suggest that
both contribute positively but clarity more so. That is, the more consensus
democracy and the more clarity, the larger is the increase in probability of
vote choice for one-unit change in proximity. This would indicate that prox-
imity considerations are more important in consensus democracies, and
more important in a situation of clarity of supply.
Turning to the Lijphart’s Consensus scale as updated by Vatter and Ber-
nauer (see Chapter 2 in this volume), the results show no systematic variation
with the increase in probability. Thus, there is no systematic moderation of
the proximity effect on vote choice. Correlations between the four measures
of change in probabilities and the Consensus scale are not significant and,
furthermore, do not show the same direction across all countries as compared
to only those where average marginal effects show statistical significance
(Table 3.4). Countries for which the average marginal effects are not signifi-
cant include France, Australia, Ireland, and Korea—all countries with majori-
tarian characteristics.
In contrast, clarity of parties’ policy position returns a statistically signifi-
cant and consistent effect (Table 3.4): the higher the clarity, the larger the
increase in probability by one-unit changes in proximity. This is true for the
group of all countries and also for the subgroup for which the average mar-
ginal effects are significant. They are statistically insignificant in Romania,
Korea, Italy, and the USA—those countries which show the lowest clarity in
policy positions.
Figure 3.2 shows the clear structure of the moderating effect of clarity of
parties’ policy positions. Where clarity is low, the change in the probability of
55
Bernhard Wessels and Hermann Schmitt
Table 3.4. Correlation between macro characteristics (Consensus scale and clarity) and
the change in vote probability by an increase in proximity
* Consensus scale: Lijphart’s executive–parties dimension, updated by Vatter and Bernauer (Chapter 2 in this volume).
** Clarity: R-square from regressing perception of parties’ left–right position on 14 factors from parties’ election manifestos.
0,25
Mean increase of probability by one-point increase in
BGR PRT05
0,15
CHE
NLD
NOR
FIN
0,10 ITA
NZE POL
AUS
USA FRA
ROU IRE
0,05 SVN
DEU
KOR
0,00
0 0,1 0,2 0,3 0,4 0,5 0,6 0,7 0,8
Clarity of policy position*
Figure 3.2. Marginal effect of proximity on vote choice conditioned by the degree of
clarity of parties’ policy positions
56
Meaningful Choices: Does Parties’ Supply Matter?
vote choice is close to zero when proximity increases from 9 to 10. It increases
steadily the higher the clarity. In countries like Sweden, Denmark, the Czech
Republic, and Spain where clarity in policy positions is highest, the change in
proximity from 9 to 10 produces a change in probability of vote choice of
about 20 percentage points.
Does this finding relate to the question of representation? It does for two
reasons. One is that in democracies with more clarity in political supply,
proximity effects on the vote are much stronger compared to party systems
with less clarity, meaning that vote choice is stronger inspired by proximity
considerations and is, thus, more related to a policy mandate. The second
reason is that there is also a systematic relation between proximity and the
clarity of supply. Remember, these are two independent measures: the rela-
tionship between policy stances as put forward in election manifestos and
the perceived left–right position of the parties, and proximity in terms of the
closeness between the left–right self-placement and the perceived party
position.
Results show that there is a systematic increase in proximity of about one
point from systems with low clarity to systems with high clarity (Figure 3.3).
9,5
ESP PRT02
9,0 NLD
DNK SWE
FIN BGR NOR
NZE CZE
DEU CHE HUN
IRE
Proximity to party voted for
7,5
7,0 ITA
R2 = 0,39
6,5
0 0,1 0,2 0,3 0,4 0,5 0,6 0,7 0,8
Clarity of policy position*
Figure 3.3. Clarity of policy positions of political parties and mean proximity to the
party voted for
57
Bernhard Wessels and Hermann Schmitt
3.5 Conclusion
58
Meaningful Choices: Does Parties’ Supply Matter?
59
4
4.1 Introduction
It has often been argued that various features of what Lijphart (1999) calls
consensus democracy, such as proportional representation, multiparty sys-
tems, coalition governments, and significant opposition influence on legisla-
tion promote party–voter linkages based on policy and ideology, while
probably undermining accountability for performance in office. The latter, in
its turn, is often thought to be promoted by features like majoritarian elec-
toral rules, two-party systems, single-party governments, and executive dom-
inance over the legislature. In this chapter we examine these propositions
using the extensive empirical evidence provided by Module 2 of the Com-
parative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) and a new set of measures for
Lijphart’s political system variables provided by Adrian Vatter and Julian Ber-
nauer for the purposes of this volume and described in Chapter 2. We depart
from an important thread of the prior literature that found that executives
and legislatures are slightly more representative of citizen preferences under
proportional than majoritarian systems (see e.g. Powell 2000; Golder and
Stramski 2010). Instead, we focus on a causally prior factor, namely the inci-
dence of policy-based voting, or, to put it in a way that is conceptually both
more accurate and better linked to macro phenomena, the responsiveness of
aggregate election returns to shifts of policy preferences among citizens. Sec-
tions 4.2 to 4.4 discuss our dependent variable, theoretical expectations, and
statistical models, respectively. Section 4.5 presents the empirical analysis
and section 4.6 concludes.
60
Policy-based Voting and the Type of Democracy
61
Diana Burlacu and Gábor Tóka
62
Policy-based Voting and the Type of Democracy
s eparated actors (such as judicial and executive power), rather than electorally
competing political parties. Hence one could equally expect them to create
divisions within parties and policy convergence across them, thus undermin-
ing policy differentiation between parties as well as its communication to
voters and voters’ motivation to act on perceived ideological differences.
All in all, we hypothesize a trade-off between the impacts of performance-
based and policy-based voting across countries. We further hypothesize that
Lijphart’s (1999) ‘executive–parties’ dimension of consensus democracy pro-
motes policy-based voting partly through ideological polarization between
the parties, but also independently of that. Finally and less clearly, country
locations along Lijphart’s federal–unitary dimension of democratic systems
should probably not affect policy-based voting either through ideological
polarization or independently of that.
63
Diana Burlacu and Gábor Tóka
would, however, hardly do any justice to the complex differences in the nature
of electoral choices between consensus and majoritarian democracies.
Therefore the dependent variable in our individual-level analyses will be
Vote choice, a multinomial variable with a country-specific coding scheme
that simply lists the major alternatives on the ballot in the given election (e.g.
Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat in the 2005 British general elec-
tion). For obvious reasons, the individual-level dependence of such a depend-
ent variable on policy preferences and other factors can only be estimated via
vote functions estimated separately for each of the 42 contexts in the analy-
sis. It would be both technically impossible and substantively meaningless to
estimate macro–micro interactions between the individual-level parameters
of such a model on the one hand, and political system characteristics on the
other. Therefore the individual- and aggregate-level analyses are carried out
in separate steps. The dependent variable in the second step is not a particular
parameter in the micro-level multinomial regressions but a quantity derived
with post-estimation data manipulation. Otherwise, however, the logic of
multilevel analysis remains intact (cf. Achen 2005; Long Jusko and Shively
2005 regarding methodological considerations; and Duch and Stevenson
2008 for a closely related example).
The individual-level analysis involves estimating a vote function separately
for each of the 42 contexts. The model posits a multinomial logit link func-
tion fn between the Vote choice variable on the left-hand side and its presumed
determinants, including Left–right self-placement, on the right-hand side. For
ease of reading, Equation 1 greatly simplifies the tedious notation for such a
model and replaces the maths of the logit link function with a simple and
generic reference to the fn link function:
The first problem that arises with the justification of this model is the notori-
ous dependence of both ideological self-placements and performance evalu-
ations on party preference itself, i.e. that our vote function may suffer from
an endogeneity problem (see e.g. Knutsen 1997 and Evans and Anderson
64
Policy-based Voting and the Type of Democracy
2006). Since our derivation of the dependent variable for the aggregate-level
analysis crucially depends on the 20 B parameter vectors estimated for each
of the 42 political contexts with the above equation, this is an important
objection. We answer it in three ways.
First, prior cross-national research by Duch and Stevenson (2008: 123ff.)
showed that relative differences between elections in the amount of
performance-oriented voting remain virtually identical whether or not the
estimates are ‘purged’ of endogeneity in performance evaluations. We
expect that the same applies to our measure of ideological voting, which
closely parallels Duch and Stevenson’s measure of the economic vote in that
they are both based on the net association between vote choice and a single
introspective question about the respondent—how s/he finds the economy
and where s/he is on a left–right scale, respectively—without using any
information about the ‘objective’ responsibility of parties for the economy
or, what would be conceptually equivalent to that, the ‘objective’ left–right
position of the parties. Second, we see no theoretical reason to suspect that
relative cross-national differences regarding performance vs policy influ-
ences on vote choices could be severely obscured by cross-national variation
in the extent to which our indicators of performance evaluations and policy
preferences are endogenous to vote choice itself. If anything, our intuition
is that endogeneity (i.e. the tendency to rationalize voting preferences in
performance-oriented or in policy-oriented ways) increases with the true
effect of performance and policy considerations on vote choices. Should
that be the case, cross-contextual variation in the endogeneity of our meas-
ures of performance- and policy-oriented considerations do not alter rela-
tive cross-national differences in the influence of these factors on vote
choices. Third, the endogeneity of these measures to party preferences must
logically be a largely non-existent or at least greatly diminished problem
among non-partisan respondents. Therefore, our actual measures of the
impact of policy preferences and performance evaluations on the vote will,
in the analysis below, be based on estimates that we are making for such
respondents. For this last reason, the vote functions that we estimate with
individual-level data for each of the 42 electoral contexts include the inter-
actions of performance evaluations and policy preferences with Strength of
party identification as shown in Equation (1) above.
A further question is due about whether Left–right self-placement and Govern-
ment performance evaluation really achieve what our model may seem to expect
from them, namely to capture all relevant performance- and policy-related
considerations. We do not think so. To be sure, the left–right semantics is large-
ly avoided in favour of other terminologies (or political dimensions) in some
countries like the USA, and only in the Japanese data set do we have a supposed
local functional equivalent (a ‘progressive–conservative’ scale) to avoid the
65
Diana Burlacu and Gábor Tóka
66
Policy-based Voting and the Type of Democracy
and we were concerned about the impact that dropping these cases might
have on the accuracy and efficiency of the estimates. Therefore we used the
Amelia 2 package of Honaker et al. (2007) to multiply impute all missing val-
ues in our individual-level data sets.3 During all individual-level statistical
analyses we made use of the country-specific socio-demographic weight vari-
ables deposited with the CSES data set, and consistently excluded everyone
who did not give a valid answer (other than did not vote, spoiled the ballot,
or voted blank/invalid) to the question about vote choice.
The first yield of our individual-level statistical analyses was a vast number
of multinomial logistic coefficients for each of 42 political contexts that are
of no theoretical interest here and cannot be presented for reasons of space.
To estimate what impact our two key theoretical variables have on vote choic-
es in the given context, we derived four quantities for each party/candidate
that make use of these initial regression coefficients. These four quantities
reflected the expected fractional share of the party/candidate among all vot-
ers in the analysis under the given model and the observed characteristics of
these respondents except that they all obtain the minimum score on the
Strength of party identification variable and, in the first case, their Left–right self-
placement moves one sample standard deviation to the left of its observed
value; in the second, their Left–right self-placement moves one sample stand-
ard deviation to the right of its observed value; in the third, their Government
performance evaluation drops one sample standard deviation below its observed
value; and, in the fourth, their Government performance evaluation rises one
sample standard deviation above its actual value.
The difference between the second and first of these quantities gives our
estimate about the Impact of policy preferences on the vote share of the given
party/candidate in the given electoral context; the difference between the
fourth and the third provides our estimate about the Impact of performance
evaluations on the vote share of the given party/candidate. To estimate the
statistical error regarding these coefficients that derive from the fact that we
base our estimates on random samples of the relevant population, we boot-
strapped the estimation of these two differences (see Efron and Tibshirani
1993 for a discussion of this method). Specifically, we took 200 random sub-
samples (with replacement) from each of the 42 samples in the analysis, and
re-estimated the parameters of Equation (1), the relevant sample standard
deviations, and the resulting estimates about the Impact of policy preferences
and the Impact of performance evaluations for each resampling. The bootstrap-
ping process provided us with 200 estimates for each of the 230 parties/can-
didates that we could distinguish between in our analysis.
Figures 4.1 and 4.2 give a sense for how these estimates look like using the
example of the countries that are the best (albeit in the majoritarian case
imperfect) examples of what Lijphart (1999) meant by majoritarian and
67
Diana Burlacu and Gábor Tóka
Figure 4.1. The effect of changes in policy demand and performance evaluations on
the vote share of UK parties in 2005
Figure 4.2. The effect of changes in policy demand and performance evaluations on
the vote share of Swiss parties in 2003
68
Policy-based Voting and the Type of Democracy
69
Diana Burlacu and Gábor Tóka
j
( Impact of policy preferences )kp = 1 / 2 ∑ ( akip ( Impact of policy preferences)kip ),
i =1
where
200
1 / 200 ∑ ( Impact of policy preferences)kip
p=1 ( Impact of policy preferences)kip
akip = ×
200
( Impact of policy preferences )kip
1 / 200 ∑ ( Impact of policy preferences)kip
p=1
(2)
j
( Impact of performance evaluations)kp = 1 / 2 ∑ ×
i=1
Figure 4.3 displays the 200 bootstrap estimates about the location of the 42
political contexts in the two-dimensional space formed by the impact of pol-
icy preferences and performance evaluations on the vote. Table 4.1 gives
mean estimates and their confidence intervals for each context. There are a
quite a few pairs and even triads of contexts for which the cloud of bootstrap
estimates clearly overlap, suggesting no statistically significant differences
Figure 4.3. The party-level effects of changing policy demand and performance eval-
uations aggregated with Pedersen index
70
Policy-based Voting and the Type of Democracy
* Confidence interval of the estimate is obtained through the fifth lowest and the fifth highest estimate across 200
resamplings from the individual-level survey data.
71
Diana Burlacu and Gábor Tóka
between these pairs and triads of cases. In the most extreme instance of such
similarities, we even had to display the acronyms for South Korea (KR) and
Portugal 2005 (PT-05) at some distance from the actual mean value of the
estimates for these contexts because otherwise their acronyms would get
mixed up in the chart with the one for Quebec (CA-Q). Yet by and large the
estimates are very distinctive regarding individual contexts, with each of
them appearing to be significantly different, at least in one of the two dimen-
sions, from a 90+ per cent majority of all other cases in our sample of 42
contexts.
Our key substantive question is whether political system characteristics
influence the incidence of policy-based voting. The aggregate-level analysis
of this question estimates the simple OLS regression model shown in Equa-
tion (4) below. The impact in question is the function of a β0 constant, the
weighted sum of the given election k’s score on an arbitrarily selected n num-
ber of political system characteristics, and an election-specific component (or
in other words residual error of the fitted values from the model). The con-
stant of the model and the election-specific components of the impact have
no theoretical relevance in our case. Instead, it is the weighting of the politi-
cal system characteristics by a set of regression coefficients called βm that
reveals what features of the political institutional context make the impact of
policy preferences bigger or smaller in elections. The model parameters can
be identified and their margin of error can be empirically estimated under the
relatively weak assumption that the εk election-specific error term is nor-
mally distributed around a mean of zero. The validity of the results of course
depends on the significantly more demanding assumption that our sample of
k elections was selected at random and is composed of independent events.
o
( Impact of policy preferences)k = β0 + ∑ βm ( Political system characteristics)mk + εk
m=1
(4)
72
Policy-based Voting and the Type of Democracy
Table 4.2 Multivariate regressions of the impact of policy preferences on political system
characteristics
Executive/parties 0.05*** (0.02) 0.42 0.05** (0.02) 0.37 0.03* (0.02) 0.26
Federal/unitary –0.04** (0.02) –0.35 –0.03* (0.02) –0.23
Polarization 0.08*** (0.03) 0.44
Constant 0.30*** (0.02) 0.30*** (0.02) 0.14** (0.05)
Adjusted R2 0.18 0.30 0.45
*** p ≤ 0.01; ** p ≤ 0.05; * p ≤ 0.10. All statistics aggregated across 200 resamplings for each of the 39 elections in
the analysis using Rubin’s (1987) rules and Carlin et al.’s (2008) ‘mim’ package.
2 survey. The source of the expert estimates about party locations was the
Macro Data Set accompanying the CSES 2 survey.5 Relevant OLS regression
estimates are displayed in Table 4.2 and will be discussed below.
The online appendix provides test results regarding the statistical significance
of the various effects in Equation 1 that involve left–right self-placement as
an indicator of policy preferences. It suffices here to summarize these results
just briefly. A simple direct effect of left–right self-placement on vote choice
is clearly significant in all but a few non-European electoral contexts, which
are the English-speaking provinces of Canada, Hong Kong, the Philippines,
and Taiwan (where the effect is of borderline significance). The additional
effects of the squared value of left–right self-placements are also statistically
significant in well over half the electoral contexts, especially often where the
number of parties/candidates in the analyses is relatively large. This makes
good theoretical sense as in conventional spatial models based on policy-
based voting some parties in the more complicated multiparty systems may
have the highest probability of support not on the extremes of the ideological
spectrum but somewhere closer to the centre. Therefore we feel that the
inclusion of this squared term in the common model for all political contexts
is well justified.
Taken together, the two interaction effects of left–right self-placement and
its squared term on the one hand and strength of partisanship on the other
are statistically insignificant in a majority of the 42 contexts. However, they
appear to register significant effects in a lot more cases than we would expect
to occur just by chance. In nearly all these latter contexts, the effects of policy
preferences tend to increase with the strength of partisanship, which is con-
sistent with our expectation that we see here a spuriously inflated effect
73
Diana Burlacu and Gábor Tóka
74
Policy-based Voting and the Type of Democracy
vote of the main opposition party. Meanwhile the vote share of the Lib Dems
would barely be affected by this change, presumably because they attract
medium-satisfied voters, whose proportion does not change much under the
given scenario. Most interesting is that in Switzerland, where all the parties in
the chart save the Greens (GPS/PES) and the ‘others’ have been part of the
federal government all the time since 1943, the vote share of parties is still
quite sensitive to shifts in performance evaluations, even if not quite as much
as in Britain. Apparently not all Swiss government parties were equally will-
ing and able to claim credit from voters satisfied with the government, and at
least one government party (the SVP/UDC) managed to attract a relatively
dissatisfied electorate in the 2003 election. Hence even under such a vastly
oversized coalition government as the one in office in Switzerland, elections
can still remain a barometer of public opinion with respect to satisfaction
with performance. Conversely, even in the relatively majoritarian democracy
of the UK, election results show more than just citizens’ satisfaction with
government. Since the parties stake out distinct ideological positions and the
voters apparently respond to that accordingly, their left–right position sub-
stantially influences the distribution of the vote over and above whatever
influence is exercised by (dis)satisfaction with government performance.
For reasons explained in section 4.4, we believe that the impact of political
system characteristics is better examined at a higher level of aggregation
than those of the individual parties, and for this reason we cumulate the
party-level effects with our slightly modified Pedersen index shown in Equa-
tions (2) and (3) into the 200 times 42 context-level estimates displayed in
Figure 4.3 and Table 4.1. The first remarkable finding here is the apparent
negative relationship between the location of electoral contexts along the
two dimensions of Figure 4.3 (significant at the p = 0.03 level).7 The negative
correlation (r = –0.34) is consistent with theoretical expectations and sug-
gests a weak trade-off between the extent to which citizens’ policy prefer-
ences and performance evaluations are reflected in election outcomes. The
contexts around the top-left corner of Figure 4.3 are characterized by strong
performance-oriented and weak policy-oriented voting, and include a con-
spicuously large number of non-European cases: the two Taiwanese elec-
tions, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Mexico, English-speaking Canada, Japan,
and Chile. On the opposite bottom-right quadrant of the figure we see an
equally remarkable concentration of European multiparty systems, with
Norway, Poland, the French-speaking part of Belgium, Italy, Finland, the
Netherlands, and Portugal in 2002 as probably the most extreme cases on
this end. It is tempting to infer that ideological self-placements (particularly
on the left–right scale) are probably much less appropriate proxies of policy
preferences in these non-European contexts, but at this point this remains
merely a speculation.
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Diana Burlacu and Gábor Tóka
Table 4.2 presents our statistical evidence about how type of democracy
may alter the responsiveness of election outcome to policy preferences in the
electorate. Here, we regress the bootstrapped estimates of the Impact of Policy
Preferences on various sets of our key independent variables. Note again that
the level-1 margin of error regarding the true Impact of Policy Preferences in
individual elections is factored in the analysis using Rubin’s (1987) rule and
the ‘mim’ package of Carlin et al. (2008), which makes these results technical
equivalents of estimated macro–macro effects in a single-step multilevel
model.
The findings are largely consistent with our theoretical expectations. The
executive–parties dimension of consensus democracy is positively and sig-
nificantly associated with the responsiveness of election outcomes to policy
preferences in the electorate, and this effect retains borderline statistical sig-
nificance at p = 0.06 even when ideological polarization between the parties
is controlled for (data not shown), and p remains 0.06 when both polariza-
tion and country location on the federal–unitary dimension are controlled
for (see the rightmost panel in Table 4.2). The bivariate impact of the execu-
tive–parties dimension on polarization is positive (with R2 = 0.09; data not
shown) and borderline significant (p = 0.06). Polarization has a substantial
and significant direct effect on the Impact of Policy Preferences net of other
model variables. However, a little over half the total effect of the executive–
parties dimension is independent of polarization. This may support our
expectation that country locations on the executive–parties dimension also
impact the clarity with which party positions are communicated to voters
and/or voters’ motivation to respond to party positions on divisive policy
issues.
Somewhat unexpectedly, country locations on the federal–unitary dimen-
sion show a similarly sizeable effect on the Impact of Policy Preferences (see
Table 4.2) as well as on Polarization (data not shown). Federalist traits are
associated with less policy voting and less polarization than unitary ones,
though the differences regarding polarization do not reach conventional lev-
els of statistical significance in either the bivariate or multivariate specifica-
tions that we tried (data not shown). The negative effect of federalism on
Impact of Policy Preferences is also just borderline significance (see Table 4.2).
4.6 Discussion
76
Policy-based Voting and the Type of Democracy
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Diana Burlacu and Gábor Tóka
Notes
1. We kept elections in the analysis even with a lower level of democracy as long as
they appeared to have been sufficiently competitive and influential for institution-
al variables related to the distinction between consensus and majoritarian democ-
racies to have any impact on the incidence of performance- or policy-oriented
voting behaviour. Hence, we only dropped one of the CSES 2 elections—the 2005
presidential election in Kyrgyzstan—from the analysis, because of the insufficient
variation on the vote choice variable caused by a candidate who collected about 90
per cent of all votes and doubts about whether vote counting was sufficiently fair
to award voters real influence on government formation. We treat as two separate
cases—though occurring in identical contexts as far as consensual vs majoritarian
traits of democracy are concerned—the elections for the French- and Dutch-
speaking lists in Belgium, Eastern and Western Germany, and Quebec and the Eng-
lish-speaking provinces of Canada, because the major within-country differences
in their party systems would have made the estimation of identical vote functions
meaningless for these regions. While these cases are hardly as independent of each
other as elections in two neighbouring countries, they are substantially different
with respect to the key dependent variables in our aggregate-level analysis (see Fig-
ure 4.3). Introducing a correction for clustering for just three pairs of cases out of a
total of 42 seemed too much ado for too little and was thus avoided in the
analysis.
2. See <http://www.personal.ceu.hu/departs/personal/Gabor_Toka/Policy/>.
3. We created five imputed data sets for each political context separately. The imputa-
tions were based on a slightly larger set of variables than those listed in the online
appendix. Technical details are available from the authors.
4. Two elections in Taiwan and one in Hong Kong had to be dropped from this analy-
sis for lack of data on some institutional features.
5. Missing expert judgements were single-imputed using information about each par-
ty’s left–right position in all CSES 2 countries as estimated via the mean value of all
voters’ placements of these parties on a left–right scale in the CSES 2 survey, or, if
that was also missing, via the mean self-placement of each party’s voters in the
survey.
6. Of course, the negative and positive signs of the changes in Figures 4.1 and 4.2
merely indicate which parties would be differently affected by homogeneous move-
ments of the electorate in a particular dimension. The size of the effect would be the
same but the sign reversed if we simulated the impact of a similar movement in a
leftward (or, in terms of performance evaluations, dissatisfied) direction.
7. As in all aggregate-level analyses reported in this chapter, here too we report esti-
mates aggregated across the 200 sets of bootstrapped estimates following Rubin’s
(1987) rules, i.e. as if we were dealing with a data set with 200 multiply imputed
values for each observation.
8. The associated p-value is 0.11 in the analysis of all 26 European elections in our
analysis, and 0.13 when only the 13 elections in older European democracies are
considered.
78
5
5.1 Introduction
Does the fact that individuals share certain important social, demographic, or
group-membership features make them likely to vote in the same way? How
strong is structural voting—‘the extent to which party choice is determined
by voters’ structural positions’ (Van der Brug 2010)—in different countries?
And what explains why the vote is more socially anchored in some countries
than in others?
There are at least three main things that, in the last decades, electoral
research has established with regard to these issues. First, there seems to have
been a point in time in the history of (at least some) democracies where vot-
ing behaviour and party systems had strong social anchors. Famously, Lipset
and Rokkan (1967) suggested that social cleavages along religious, class, and
other lines had contributed, during democratization processes and in histori-
cally contingent combinations, to define groups of voters with conflicting
interests and values, as well as corresponding party labels and organizations
that represented them. Such alignments between voters and parties were
made stable through both political socialization and parties’ organizational
linkages to society, particularly through the role of unions and organized
religion. By the time Lipset and Rokkan wrote, it was argued that those align-
ments, reflecting processes that had taken place many decades before, had
become ‘frozen’, a diagnostic confirmed by subsequent works (Rose and
Urwin 1969). This seemed to square rather well with a particular view about
what allowed parties to perform a representative role in a democracy: a popu-
lar claim to representation (Saward 2010), based on the notion that mass
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Pedro C. Magalhães
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Political Institutions and the Social Anchoring of the Vote
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Pedro C. Magalhães
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Political Institutions and the Social Anchoring of the Vote
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Pedro C. Magalhães
5.2.2 Presidentialism
There is more to say about the relationship between political institutions and
structural voting than focusing exclusively on the electoral rules that prevail
in legislative elections or, more broadly, on the extent to which a democracy
is ‘majoritarian’ or ‘consensual’. There is an additional hypothesis that, as far
as I know, has not yet been systematically investigated: it relates presidential-
ism to a lower social anchoring of the vote.
Of course, some of the possible consequences of presidentialism are, in a
sense, partially captured by the notions of ‘consensual’ vs ‘majoritarian’
democracy. If we focus strictly on the composition of executive power, presi-
dentialism’s election rules and unipersonal executive office already ensure,
by definition, ‘majoritarianism’. However, there might be additional aspects
of presidential systems that, in comparison with other systems—regardless of
whether they are majoritarian or consensual—are likely to make structural
voting less prevalent.
The crucial aspect here concerns the separate origin and survival of the
executive in relation to the legislature that characterizes presidentialism. On
the one hand, it is not indifferent whether legislative elections coexist with
presidential elections that determine the composition of the executive, as in
presidential systems, or whether legislative elections solely contribute to
determine the executive’s composition, as in parliamentary systems. In the
former case, voters are systematically exposed to two different sorts of elec-
toral appeal: from parties, in legislative elections, and from presidential can-
didates, in presidential elections. Given the incentives provided by majority
rule for the election of presidents, policy positions and electoral appeals on
the part of candidates tend to be more personalized, more centrist, and more
aimed at the median voter (Wiesehomeier and Benoit 2009). This also means
that, in presidential systems, even legislative elections run under PR can be
contaminated by a majoritarian logic. There is empirical evidence of such
contamination. Samuels and Shugart (2010), for example, show that in the
rare instances where we are able to observe moves towards rules that promote
a separation between origin and/or survival of the executive and legislature,
we also tend to observe a change in the organization and behaviour of parties
that leads—at least for the larger parties—towards ‘vote-seeking’ strategies,
greater personalization of politics, and a lower importance of ideology in
legislative elections. In other words, presidentialism tends to ‘presidentialize’
party appeals in legislative elections and infuse them with a majoritarian
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Political Institutions and the Social Anchoring of the Vote
logic, even if the particular institutional rules that govern legislative elections
would not lead us to predict such outcome.
There is a second potential consequence of presidentialism. The separation
in the origin and survival of executives and legislatures undermines party
unity and loyalty in the legislature, giving MPs lower incentives to behave
cohesively and breaking linkages between legislators and the party leadership
(Carey and Shugart 1995). From this point of view, presidentialism affects
electoral party politics by allowing candidates in legislative elections to dif-
ferentiate from each other and to serve their specific constituencies, rather
than adopting national party platforms and building linkages with broadly
defined social groups and interests. There is also considerable evidence of this
phenomenon. Presidential systems tend to be characterized by greater intra-
party divergence, by ‘personal vote’, and by a low level of nationalization of
politics (Carey and Shugary 1995; Morgenstern and Swindle 2005; Morgen-
stern, Swindle and Castagnola 2009). These developments, by being inimical
to the establishment of strong and stable links between parties and social
groups, should lead us to expect presidential systems to be characterized by
lower levels of structural voting.
85
Pedro C. Magalhães
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Political Institutions and the Social Anchoring of the Vote
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Pedro C. Magalhães
1 p
∑ (Vgj − Vj )
2
SVg =
2 j=1
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Political Institutions and the Social Anchoring of the Vote
1 G
SV =
G−1
∑ ( SV
g =1
g × sg )
2G
The properties of SV are particularly useful for our purposes. First, it ranges
from 0 to 1. In our example, if in a given election Blue and Green voters dis-
tribute themselves among the parties in the exact same way, SV = 0. Con-
versely, if all Blue voters choose one party while all Green voters choose
another, SV = 1. Second, the measure is sensitive to group size. Imagine that
Blue and Green voters distribute themselves by parties similarly in two differ-
ent countries. However, in country 1, Blues and Greens represent equal pro-
portions of the electorate, while in country 2 Greens are only 10 per cent of
the electorate. In the latter case, SV will be lower. Finally, weighting by a func-
tion of the number of groups ensures that, for any number of groups in any
given election, SV will always be equal to 0 if the distribution of the vote for
each group is the same.
While groups can be defined in ethnic or ethno-linguistic terms, as in
Huber’s study, they can also be defined in other ways. For example, members
and non-members of unions form two groups, and Huber’s measure can be
used to assess the extent to which knowledge of a voter’s membership in a
union helps us predict, in any given election, his or her vote choice. Men and
women form two different groups on the basis of gender. Individuals defined
in terms of the frequency of their religious attendance can also be thought of
as forming different groups, and the same occurs with those belonging to dif-
ferent social classes or religious denominations. Thus, using Huber’s measure,
we can extend our analysis to other manifestations of structural voting.2
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Pedro C. Magalhães
elections that have taken place in non-democratic regimes, which led to the
exclusion of Kyrgyzstan, Hong Kong, and Russia. Furthermore, we study here
exclusively legislative elections, which led to the exclusion of surveys in
Chile and Peru, which studied vote choices in presidential elections.
Considering the relevant socio-demographic variables available in the
CSES surveys, we focus our analysis on class voting and on its organizational
dimension (i.e. trade union membership), on religious voting (both in terms
of religious denomination and religiosity), and on gender voting. Ideally, one
would like to be able to include a measure of ethnic voting too. However, a
question about ethnicity was asked in only 16 of our 34 election surveys, forc-
ing us to exclude ethnic voting from the analysis. Conversely, of the 34 CSES
surveys, all contained a question determining whether the respondent
belonged to a trade union. Socio-economic status is measured by a nominal
variable with four categories, based on answers to questions about the
respondent’s occupation. The four categories are ‘white-collar’ (non-manual
employees), ‘worker’ (workers engaged in manual labour), ‘self-employed’
(covering entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, and professionals), and farmers. This
variable is available for 28 of the 34 elections considered. In the case of religi-
osity, for the 32 surveys where the question was available, we distinguish
between individuals who report attending religious services at least once a
week (coded as 1) from all other individuals (coded as 0).3 Questions about
religious denomination were asked in 29 elections. Finally, we look at gender,
for which we have measures in all 34 surveys.
Table 5.1 displays 157 indices. To improve readability, cells with higher
indices are displayed with darker colours. Purely for presentational purposes,
countries are sorted by their average levels of structural voting across the five
measures.
The first thing that emerges even from a cursory observation of Table 5.1 is
the fact that some countries seem to consistently display comparatively high-
er levels of structural voting across the board. The fact that Switzerland, Swe-
den, or Israel, for example, emerges with comparatively higher levels of
structural voting, or that the Czech Republic also stands out among East
European countries in this respect, is not particularly surprising in the light
of previous studies (Norris 2004; Van der Brug 2010). Conversely, countries
such as the Philippines, Mexico, and Taiwan appear here, also as in other
studies (Norris 2004), with consistently very low levels of structural voting.
This suggests the possibility that some common underlying factors may be
driving the social anchoring of the electorate down or up, regardless of the
particular socio-demographic variable with which one is concerned.
At the same time, however, it is also clear that generic measures of s tructural
voting are likely to miss out on relevant differences between countries. In Swe-
den, for example, social class and union membership appear as comparatively
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Political Institutions and the Social Anchoring of the Vote
strong predictors of the vote. In the 2002 elections under analysis, both the
Swedish Social Democrats and the Left Party did considerably better among
the (large number of) union members than, in contrast, the Moderate or the
Christian Democratic parties. Similarly, while the Social Democrats did par-
ticularly well among working-class voters, those who were self-employed or
white collar were rather more likely to vote for the Moderate or the Liberal
People’s Party, while farmers flocked to Centre Party. In contrast, religiosity
seems to be of almost no consequence in Sweden. The Netherlands exempli-
fies the opposite situation. In the 2002 elections, Catholic and (to a lesser
extent) Protestant (Calvinist) voters were much more likely to choose the
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Pedro C. Magalhães
Christian Democratic Appeal party, while the Christian Union party also
managed to attract an important share of Protestants (but, predictably, not
Catholics). At the same time, individuals professing no religion were rather
more likely to vote for the Labour or the Green parties, while the small share
of Muslim voters massively concentrated their vote in the Labour party. In
contrast, occupational variables played little role in structuring the vote in the
Netherlands 2002 election. Although farmers, for example, did seem to dis-
play very different voting patterns from other groups defined in terms of
socio-economic status, their very small number in the sample ends up result-
ing in an index of class voting for the Netherlands that is among the lowest in
our sample of countries.
Several of these variations have been known for some time. In Rose’s semi-
nal study of 12 Western democracies (1973), Scandinavian countries emerged
as those where occupational cleavages contributed more to structure the
vote, which in turn appeared to be of little to no relevance in countries such
as the Netherlands, Ireland, Canada, the UK, or the USA. Similarly, he found
that the Netherlands stood out as a country where religion played a crucial
role, a finding replicated by the more recent comparative study by Van der
Brug (2009). Our results, albeit expanding the cross-national scope of com-
parison, generally tend to replicate these patterns. In other words, even if it is
the case that structural voting is experiencing a secular decline, as the litera-
ture has documented, many of the known differences between countries
seem to be highly resilient. What explains them?
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Political Institutions and the Social Anchoring of the Vote
Religiosity Gender
Figure 5.1. Plots of structural voting indices (y-axis) against consensual democracy
(executives–parties) index (x-axis), with linear regression fit lines
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Pedro C. Magalhães
.10
.05
.00
0 1 0 1 0 1
Religiosity Gender
.15
.10
.05
.00
0 1 0 1
Figure 5.2. Average values of structural voting indices for presidential systems (1)
and parliamentary or semi-presidential systems (0). Error bars are 90per cent confi-
dence intervals
94
Political Institutions and the Social Anchoring of the Vote
*p < 0.10; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.0.01; White Heteroskedasticity-consistent standard errors in parenthesis.
95
Pedro C. Magalhães
continuous democracy until the date of the election. However, results remained
fundamentally unchanged for all models. These null results are also not due
to multicollinearity problems: the highest variance inflation factor (VIF)
found for any coefficient in any model is 3.02, below the conventional cut-off
levels above which multicollinearity starts being a problem.
In contrast, political institutions go a long way in accounting for why struc-
tural voting is stronger in some countries than in others. Early on, we had
seen that some countries seemed to display low levels of structural voting
across the board, suggesting the existence of common underlying factors that
decreased the overall social anchoring of the vote from all points of view.
Table 5.2 shows that presidentialism is such a factor. Hypothesis 2 is sup-
ported in all cases: all coefficients are negative, as expected, and all are statisti-
cally significant at conventional levels. Hypothesis 1 receives a more qualified
support. Consensual institutions—with more permissive electoral systems, a
larger number of parties, and stronger parliaments—are indeed associated
with greater levels of religious and gender voting. In the cases of class or
union membership voting, although the coefficient is positive, it is also short
of conventional levels of statistical significance.
What can we say about the magnitude of these institutional effects? Given
that the dependent variables had been transformed for the OLS analysis,
Table 5.3 displays calculated marginal effects, capturing the change in the value
of the different dependent variables produced by a one-unit change in the
value of our two institutional variables, consensual democracy and presiden-
tialism. For the case of consensual democracy, we also show the predicted effect
of a change from the minimum (UK) to the maximum (Belgium) values.
In comparison with parliamentary or semi-presidential systems, presiden-
tialism decreases the predicted value of the index of religiosity-based voting
by about two standard deviations and the predicted value of all remaining
indices by about one standard deviation. Similarly, if we focus on the effect of
a move from the minimum to the maximum value of consensual democracy,
voting based on religious denomination is predicted to increase by almost
three standard deviations, two standard deviations in what concerns religios-
ity, and one standard deviation in gender voting. In sum, the resilient differ-
ences in terms of social anchoring of the vote between modern democracies
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Political Institutions and the Social Anchoring of the Vote
5.4 Conclusion
Lipset and Rokkan (1967) are often presented as the seminal source for a
‘sociological’ approach to the explanation of voters’ alignments with parties.
However, as Franklin reminds us, this does little justice to Lipset and Rokkan’s
thinking: they ‘expressly recognized that different party systems in different
countries resulted from different historical developments and different insti-
tutional settings’ (Franklin 2010: 655). Among those institutional settings,
they argued, electoral and policymaking rules played an important role
(Lipset and Rokkan 1967: 26–31). And if such factors were consequential for
the formation of voter–party alignments in early decades of the twentieth
century, there are good reasons to believe not only that their legacies might
still be visible, as Lipset and Rokkan argued was still the case in the late 1960s,
but also that they may continue to be relevant for how parties appeal to par-
ticular segments of society and how voters respond to those appeals.
Indeed, we found that cross-national differences in the extent to which
voting behaviour is socially anchored seem to be largely driven by institu-
tional factors. Given the Western European bent of most comparative studies
on ‘cleavage politics’ and its decline, presidentialism had not yet been exam-
ined as one of such factors. However, we show that institutional rules that
separate the origin and survival of parliaments and executives seem to create
disincentives for the adoption, in legislative elections, of appeals to socially
defined and rooted groups of voters, thus promoting greater social heteroge-
neity of party constituencies. Presidentialism is negatively related to all kinds
of structural voting, including the role of occupational and social class vari-
ables, religion, and gender. A second institutional factor that seems to be rel-
evant is, less surprisingly, a country’s type of democracy, in Lijphart’s sense.
In democracies where electoral systems are less permissive, where party sys-
tem fragmentation is lower, and executive dominance over policymaking is
more pronounced, the anchoring of the vote on religious and gender differ-
ences turns out to be weaker.
At the same time, we found that other commonly advanced hypotheses
about expected declines (or rises) in structural voting do not seem to translate
particularly well as accounts of cross-national variations. It has been suggest-
ed, for example, that a country’s continued experience with democracy is
likely to affect (positively for some, negatively for others) parties’ alignments
with particular social groups. But with the exception of the relationship
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Pedro C. Magalhães
Notes
1. See, for example, Inglehart and Rabier (1986) and Inglehart (1997), on the one
hand, and Kitschelt (1994) and Kriesi (1998), on the other.
2. An alternative would be using propensity to vote (PTV) questions for each main
party (Van der Eijk and Franklin 1996). This approach has been put to good use in
a few analyses of structural voting (see, for example, Van der Brug 2010). However,
although the CSES surveys, in Modules 1, 2, and 3, contain one set of questions that
alluringly approximate a PTV measure, i.e. a set of like–dislike scores vis-à-vis all
major parties in the party system, Van der Eijk and Marsh (2007) show that like–
dislike scores have much worse properties than PTV scores, especially in what con-
cerns the crucial aspect of the relationship with actual vote choices.
3. In the few surveys where no church attendance question was asked but a religiosity
question was (‘How religious are you?’), we coded as 1 those who responded ‘very
religious’.
4. The exception is gender, where ‘fractionalization’ is basically close to a constant in
all countries.
98
6
6.1 Introduction
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André Blais, Shane Singh, and Delia Dumitrescu
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Political Institutions, Perceptions of Representation, and Turnout
of their overall feeling about a party at a given point in time. Compared to the
long-standing psychological identification with a party, we expect percep-
tions of representation to be more ‘fluid’ (Oakes 2002; Huddy 2002). That is,
we expect them to be less stable over time, and more susceptible to be acti-
vated by the debates taking place at election time.
Our attention then focuses on the contextual factors that are more suscep-
tible to activate these perceptions. We first examine the potential impact of
consensus democracy. As consensual democracy is generally associated with
the presence of many parties, one may infer that citizens in this type of
democracy find it easier to identify a party that matches their views about
what the government should or should not do. At the same time, however,
the search for consensus and the depoliticization of disagreements may lead
to the perception that no specific party really defends one’s particular inter-
ests or values. Furthermore, depoliticization may produce boring election
campaigns with few mobilization efforts, and this may well contribute to a
lower turnout.
In a second step, we look at the effect of the electoral system on represen-
tation. As per Powell (2000), there are two broad visions of representation:
the majoritarian vision and the proportional vision. In the majoritarian
vision, individuals should be allowed to choose the government, thus max-
imizing responsiveness and accountability, while in the proportional vision
voters choose agents to do their bidding, which should lead to policy that
represents the largest possible amount of voters. The most critical way in
which these two very different visions are institutionalized is via the elec-
toral system, with non-PR systems pushing the majoritarian vision and PR
systems promoting the proportional vision. Assuming that an individual’s
perception of party representation is a function of both policy representa-
tion and, more generally, political identity, there is some reason to expect
PR systems to be more conducive to stronger individual perceptions of
representation.
Wessels and Schmitt (2006) examine the relationship between the charac-
teristics of a country’s electoral context and the likelihood of identifying a
party perceived as representing one’s views. They find that ‘where supply
structures are meaningful [in the sense that there are a lot of political options
available to voters], voters find it easier to identify a party which represents
them’. Similarly, McAllister (2005) finds a weak, but significant, negative cor-
relation between the type of electoral system (majoritarian or not) and the
percentage of individuals who believe that there is a party representing their
views in the system. In the same vein, Banducci et al. (1999) find that atti-
tudes about government responsiveness among individuals in New Zealand
became more positive once the country switched from a first-past-the-post to
a more proportional mixed-member compensatory system.
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André Blais, Shane Singh, and Delia Dumitrescu
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Political Institutions, Perceptions of Representation, and Turnout
become more polarized under PR, to the presence of more parties under
PR, or to both factors.
Finally, a number of analyses have found that PR tends to foster higher
turnout (Jackman 1987; Blais and Carty 1991; Franklin 1996; Radcliff and
Davis 2000. For a more sceptical perspective, see Blais and Aarts 2006; Blais
2006). Given the expected independent effect of the electoral system on
perceptions of representation, and the mechanisms linking these to
turnout, we theorize that this relationship between the electoral system
and turnout should disappear when we take into account feelings of
representation.
The data come from Module 2 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Sys-
tems (CSES). Case selection was based on countries conducting legislative
elections in the CSES sample and data availability. We end up with 32 elec-
tions across 31 countries,1 and 35,980 individuals. There are an average of
1,124 individuals per election, with a minimum of 393 and a maximum of
1,916. Figure 6.1 depicts actual turnout in each of the elections we cover. To
empirically examine the above theory, we construct a model using the fol-
lowing variables, which are measured at both the individual and election
levels.
Our primary dependent variable is whether somebody voted or not. The vari-
able voted is a dichotomous variable that indicates whether an individual
reported voting: coded 1 if she voted and 0 otherwise.
Our second key variable is feel represented, a variable measured with a ques-
tion that inquires whether the respondent feels represented by any particular
party.2 The variable is coded 1 for those who feel represented and 0
otherwise.
We control for the following two political variables: efficacy (measuring the
degree to which the respondent feels that her vote makes a difference, with
higher values corresponding to greater efficacy)3 and party ID (coded 1 for
those who feel close to a party and 0 otherwise).4
We also include the following variables at the individual level: age (meas-
ured in years), gender (coded 1 for females), income (measured in quintiles)
and college education (a dichotomous variable coded 1 for individuals with a
college education and 0 otherwise).
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André Blais, Shane Singh, and Delia Dumitrescu
Mexico 2003
Switzerland 2003
Poland 2001
Albania 2005
United States 2004
Japan 2004
Czech Republic 2002
Romania 2004
S. Korea 2004
Slovenia 2004
Canada 2004
United Kingdom 2005
Portugal 2002
Ireland 2002
Portugal 2005
Taiwan 2001
Bulgaria 2001
Israel 2003
Finland 2003
Hungary 2002
France 2002
Norway 2001
Spain 2004
New Zealand 2002
Germany 2002
Sweden 2002
Brazil 2002
Italy 2006
Denmark 2001
Iceland 2003
Peru 2006
Australia 2004
40 60 80 100
Turnout (%)
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Political Institutions, Perceptions of Representation, and Turnout
At the election level there are three key independent variables. Two of them
represent primary dimensions of consensus democracy. The first dimension,
the Consensus, executives–parties index, encompasses the effective number of
parties, cabinet type, executive–legislative relations, and electoral dispropor-
tionality. The second dimension of consensus democracy, the Consensus, fed-
eral–unitary index, encompasses federalism, bicameralism, and judicial review.
Both variables are discussed at length in Vatter and Bernauer (2010b). Our third
key independent variable, Proportional, is coded 1 for proportional electoral
systems or mixed systems with a compensatory component and 0 for all else.
We also include the following controls: compulsory (a dichotomous variable
that equals 1 for Australia and Peru,5 the two countries in our sample with
compulsory voting with some enforcement of sanctions (Birch 2009: 36;
Singh 2011)), age of party system (the average age of political parties in a coun-
try, measured in years; based on Kittilson and Anderson (2011)), polarization
(Dalton’s (2008) party polarization index)6, and the number of parties (using
Laakso and Taagepera’s (1979) effective number of electoral parties index).7
Individuals who are more interested in politics (and more prone to vote)
are more inclined to participate in political surveys. Furthermore, people
sometimes incorrectly report having participated in an election, perhaps due
to faulty recollection or social desirability bias (Karp and Brockington 2005).
To correct for these biases, we have reweighted the data set so that the report-
ed turnout in each election study corresponds to the official turnout.
Note: Cell entries are column percentages of respondents reporting having voted or not. Survey weights are used to
correct for over-reporting of turnout.
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André Blais, Shane Singh, and Delia Dumitrescu
Model A
Note: Dependent variable is whether one voted. Survey weights are used to correct for over-reporting of turnout.
P-values are two-sided.
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Political Institutions, Perceptions of Representation, and Turnout
Note: Dependent variable is proportion of respondents that feel represented. P-values are two-sided.
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André Blais, Shane Singh, and Delia Dumitrescu
In the last stage of our analysis, we investigate how political institutions and
feelings of representation combine to affect the decision to vote or not to
vote. The individual-level variables are those already considered above: feel-
ing represented, party identification, political efficacy, age, gender, educa-
tion, and income. The main contextual variables are again consensual
democracy and the electoral system, but we control for whether voting is
compulsory or not. Because we are now interested in the effects of both indi-
vidual-level and contextual factors, a multilevel estimation is warranted. We
thus fit a random intercept to each election. Due to the dichotomous nature
of the dependent variable, the covariates are mapped to individual turnout
with a logistic link function. To estimate the models, we employ gllamm
(Rabe-Hesketh and Skrondal 2005).
The results are presented in Table 6.4. Model E includes socio-economic
characteristics and contextual variables, that is, the electoral system and
compulsory voting. We can see that those in proportional or compensatory
mixed systems do have a higher probability of voting. Post-estimation predic-
tions show that the propensity to vote is two percentage points higher among
individuals in our sample living under a PR system.
As mentioned in the introduction, there is the possibility that what matters
is not the electoral system as such but a broader political arrangement of
which PR is just one component: the consensus model of democracy. We put
this alternative possibility to a test in Model F of Table 6.4, in which we
replace the PR dummy variable with the two main dimensions of consensus
democracy: executives–parties and federal–unitary.10 As expected, we do not
find evidence for the beneficial effect of ‘consensualism’ on turnout in the
same manner that we find for PR. If anything, there is a negative relationship
between the federal–unitary consensualism dimension and the likelihood of
voting.
We further expect that the relationship between PR and turnout loses its
significance when perceptions of representation are taken into account.
Model G in Table 6.5 presents a more complete model with the addition of
perceptions of representation and the other individual-level variables intro-
duced in Model A.
The findings show that even when controlling for contextual effects, feel-
ing represented by a party does increase the propensity to vote. Results also
indicate that compulsory voting substantially contributes to a higher turn-
out, irrespective of one’s feeling of representation (and party identification
and political efficacy). Everything else being equal, among the individuals in
our sample, the average likelihood of voting is 22 percentage points higher in
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Political Institutions, Perceptions of Representation, and Turnout
Model E Model F
Individual level
Age 0.026 0.000 0.025 0.000
Female –0.031 0.415 –0.045 0.267
Income 0.179 0.000 0.173 0.000
Education 0.518 0.000 0.568 0.000
Institutional
Proportional 0.268 0.000
Consensus, executives–parties 0.044 0.295
Consensus, federal–unitary –0.079 0.055
Compulsory 2.354 0.000 2.006 0.000
Constant –1.101 0.000 –1.015 0.000
Note: Dependent variable is whether one voted. Survey weights are used to correct for over-reporting of turnout.
P-values are two-sided.
6.9 Conclusion
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André Blais, Shane Singh, and Delia Dumitrescu
Table 6.5. Voting, institutions, and feelings of representation; multilevel logit estimation
Model G Model H
Individual level
Age 0.024 0.000 0.023 0.000
Female 0.005 0.883 –0.004 0.920
Income 0.159 0.000 0.160 0.000
Education 0.412 0.000 0.402 0.000
Feel represented 0.681 0.000 0.490 0.000
Party ID 0.588 0.000 0.617 0.000
Efficacy 0.211 0.000 0.214 0.000
Institutional
Proportional 0.014 0.837 0.122 0.427
Compulsory 1.643 0.000 1.621 0.000
Interactions
Feel represented × 0.211 0.210
proportional
Feel represented × –0.267 0.187
Compulsory
Constant –2.317 0.000 –0.244 0.000
Note: Dependent variable is whether one voted. Survey weights are used to correct for over-reporting of turnout.
P-values are two-sided.
2003), the focus of the debate has been more on how representation is
achieved. In this paper we take the voter’s perspective and examine the con-
textual determinants and consequences of how representation is perceived
using CSES data from 32 elections in 31 countries.
In a nutshell we have found the following. First, the simple fact of perceiv-
ing that there exists a party representing one’s views is a strong predictor of
whether one will turn out to vote or not. This relationship holds even when
controlling for other individual-level and contextual variables. Second, PR is
generally more conducive to an individual feeling represented by a party.
However, this relationship is mediated, as least partly, by the polarization of
the party system. Finally, the positive relationship between PR and turnout
attenuates sharply when perceptions of being represented are introduced in
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Political Institutions, Perceptions of Representation, and Turnout
the analysis. In other words, the effect of the PR system is mediated by indi-
viduals’ ability to identify a party representing their views.
The importance of perceived representation by a party raises theoretical
questions about the nature of this perception, requiring further investigation.
Given that voters are cognitive misers, we work under the assumption that
these perceptions are partly grounded in actual agreement with party policies
and partly grounded in more fluid partisan feelings, both of which depend on
the amount and clarity of partisan information that individuals can easily
access. While perceptions of being represented and partisan identification are
not one and the same, theoretical advances in identity theory (e.g. Oakes
2002) suggest that the difference might lie in the role that contextual factors
play in their activation. In particular, perceptions of representation might
require a polarized context (conducive to clearer information on differenti-
ated alternatives) to be activated. This is consistent with our findings with
regard to the mediating role of polarization.
With respect to institutional variables, we have confirmed that PR contrib-
utes to a higher turnout, though it should be kept in mind that the effect is
quite modest (two percentage points). More importantly, we have shown that
the effect takes place, in part, through a more polarized party system. We
have also shown that what is at play is a specific institutional rule, the elec-
toral system, rather than a whole conglomeration of approaches to democ-
racy subsumed under the consensual model of democracy.
Finally, our analysis bears certain limitations. As we use individuals’
responses to just one question, these results should be taken are preliminary.
Further analyses should incorporate a measure of the actual congruence
between individuals’ policy views and those advocated by parties (e.g. Giger
et al. 2009).
Notes
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André Blais, Shane Singh, and Delia Dumitrescu
2
( xi − x )
6. ∑ vi ×
5
where vi is the proportion of votes for party i in a given
112
7
7.1 Introduction
113
Steven Weldon and Russell Dalton
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Democratic Structures and Democratic Participation
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Steven Weldon and Russell Dalton
patterns. For example, previous research suggests that a party system’s level of
left–right ideological polarization can influence turnout and citizen attitudes
(Karp and Banducci 2008; Kittilson and Anderson 2011). Larger ideological
differences among parties may lead voters to see greater consequences in elec-
toral outcomes (Dalton 2008). This is also likely to stimulate more intensive
forms of political action. Similarly, citizens may be more likely to participate
when the election itself is of greater importance. We control for this, differen-
tiating among countries that held legislative elections only, a presidential
election only, and joint legislative and presidential elections. We expect par-
ticipation is higher when a country holds legislative and presidential elec-
tions simultaneously.
We also expect that participation differs across established and developing
democracies (Norris 2002). Established democracies have institutionalized
party systems that are well experienced in running campaigns and mobilizing
voters, who tend to have stronger party ties. Established democracies also typi-
cally have a more robust civil society, which can stimulate group activity, con-
tacting, and even direct forms of action (Welzel, Inglehart and Deutsch 2005;
Dalton, Van Sickle and Weldon 2010). In a similar logic, wealthier countries
should have higher levels of citizen participation (Verba, Nie and Kim 1978).
Affluence, a highly skilled public, and citizens freely engaging in voluntary
associations create a resource environment that can support political action.
Thus, we expect a positive relationship between national affluence and vari-
ous forms of participation (Norris 2002; Dalton, Van Sickle and Weldon 2010).
We recognize that there may be other contextual factors that shape politi-
cal engagement beyond those described here, especially for specific types of
political activities. The literature on voting turnout, for example, has identi-
fied several constitutional and electoral institutions that can affect turnout
(Blais 2006). However, the above discussion provides a theoretical base for
examining how key institutional factors, including consensus versus majori-
tarian institutions, affect a broader range of political activities.
While our chief interest lies in how institutions and other contextual-level fac-
tors shape patterns of political participation, participation is ultimately an indi-
vidual act. Thus, we need to link our expectations about the role of institutions
directly to micro-level theories of collective action.1 We start with Verba,
Schlozman and Brady’s (1995) general individual-level model of political par-
ticipation—the Civic Voluntarism Model. Verba and his colleagues succinctly
argue that people participate because ‘they want to’, ‘they can’, and ‘somebody
asked’.
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Democratic Structures and Democratic Participation
The first factor recognizes that political action requires motivation. Indi-
viduals must have a spur to action: a grievance or a good that they desire. Put
differently, ambivalence inhibits participation. We examine this with
respondents’ satisfaction with democracy, which typically increases electoral
participation and decreases contentious action. Also, the more that individu-
als care about an issue, the more likely they will act to achieve it. That is,
intensity of preferences matters. We test this with two indicators: ideological
extremism and party attachment. We hypothesize that the more ideologically
extreme and strong party identifiers are more likely to engage in electoral
politics, although the impact of these factors may vary for non-electoral
participation.
Individuals must also believe that action has the potential to achieve the
desired outcome. If they believe political elites or the system as a whole are
non-responsive, then the perceived (instrumental) benefits of participation
decrease. We test for this with the belief that it matters which parties are in
government, or what might be termed power efficacy. We hypothesize that it
relates positively to all forms of participation, but particularly voting and
other conventional acts (Almond and Verba 1963). Similarly, if one feels rep-
resented by a party, one should be more likely to turn out to support that party
(see Blais et al. in this volume). However, this might also limit engagement in
other activities, particularly unconventional activities not directly related to
the success of the favoured party in elections. Indeed, as discussed above in
regard to Kitschelt’s opportunity theory of participation, one who does not
feel represented by a political party may be more likely to engage in elite-
challenging behaviour such as protest.
The second factor focuses on how individual and collective resources are
necessary to overcome the costs of political action (Verba, Nie and Kim 1978;
Rosenstone and Hansen 1993; Norris 2002). People participate when they
have time, are better educated, and have higher levels of income. We test for
education and income with the expectation that they correlate positively with
all forms of participation. We also hypothesize, however, that they relate
more strongly to resource-intensive forms of activism, such as group activity,
contacting political officials, and protest. In many ways, voting, a less inten-
sive activity, may help level the playing field between the resource-rich and
resource-poor.
Third, social networks and mobilization efforts can increase political action
(Gerber, Green and Larimer 2008). They may increase awareness of problems
and the need for action. They also may lower the costs of political engage-
ment by communicating necessary information, such as the location of pro-
test sites or informing one of the organizations already working on an issue.
Furthermore, social networks can increase the costs of not participating,
because of social pressure, informal sanctions from acquaintances (those
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Steven Weldon and Russell Dalton
often doing the mobilizing), and reciprocity expectations for certain types of
activities. Given that non-voting modes of activism tend to be even more
social in nature, we expect mobilization has an even stronger influence on
these activities. Due to limited indicators in the CSES, we are able to examine
just one type of mobilization in the current study, whether the respondent
was contacted by a political party.2
These six items do not span the full range of possible political activities, but
the data do provide several distinct advantages. The survey questions include
examples of each of Verba and Nie’s (1972) four modes of political action—
voting, campaign activity, contacting, and communal action—along with a
fifth mode of political protest. The timing of the CSES surveys following
national elections produces more comparability for the election-related ques-
tions than surveys staggered at different points in the electoral cycle. The
battery of non-electoral questions has a longer timeframe (activity in the past
five years) and so timing is less important for these items. The breadth of the
CSES nations also provides the contextual variation we need to examine the
correlates of participation patterns.
Table 7.1 displays the cross-national distribution of political activity.4
While the patterns of voting turnout are well known, the cross-national
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Democratic Structures and Democratic Participation
evidence for other forms of political action are more limited (also see Norris
2002; Van der Meer 2009). For example, some nations with the highest levels
of turnout (often because voting is mandatory) have relatively low levels of
campaign activity. Thus, more than 80 per cent of Australians and Belgians
voted in the election, but these nations rank near the cross-national median
in levels of campaign activity. Conversely, the United States and Switzerland
are regularly noted for their very low election turnout, but campaign activity
is very high in the United States and close to the cross-national average in
Source: Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, Module 2; vote turnout from IDEA (voting-age public).
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Steven Weldon and Russell Dalton
Switzerland. The table demonstrates the great variation in the levels of politi-
cal activity both across nations and across different modes of action.
It is difficult to determine the interrelationships between political activities
across nations from all the statistics in Table 7.1. We might expect participa-
tion levels to be positively correlated across nations, since an engaged demo-
cratic public is likely to participate in many ways. Alternatively, political
institutions or cultural traditions may produce distinct patterns of action
across different modes. For example, the French follow an expected pattern
of relatively high levels of protest activity, but modest levels of campaign
activity. In additional analyses (not shown) we explored the bivariate correla-
tions between these six activities.5 For turnout we used voting-age public
(VAP) calculated by IDEA from national voting statistics, and self-reported
turnout from the CSES surveys. Both measures are strongly related across
nations (r = 0.74), with self-reported turnout substantially higher than IDEA
calculations.6 We also found that political participation tends to be general-
ized across different modes of action. In nations where people are actively
showing their support for a party during the campaign, for example, they are
also more likely to try to persuade others how to vote (r = 0.71). However,
voting stands somewhat by itself. Other forms of participation are only mod-
estly related to self-reported voter turnout, and almost unconnected to
national statistics on turnout from the IDEA.7 This is a first indication that
past research focusing on the effects of institutional structures on voting
turnout may not accurately describe the impact of these same institutions on
other forms of political activity.
120
Table 7.2. Contextual correlates of political participation
Predictor IDEA vote CSES vote Campaign activity Persuade others Contact politician Work in group Protest
Consensualism indices
122
Democratic Structures and Democratic Participation
parties encourage their supporters to come to the polls. This is also apparent
in comparing party-centred versus candidate-centred party systems. Yet party
mobilization, and implicitly public norms of citizen participation, often seems
to stop at casting a ballot in these party-centred systems.
The final panel in Table 7.2 shows the relationships between development
(political and economic) and the modes of participation. Beyond the impact
of consensualism variables, the democratic development of a nation may also
affect participation patterns. As other scholars have demonstrated (Norris
2002), more democratic nations tend to have higher levels of turnout—
although these patterns are reversed for campaign activity. Being an estab-
lished democracy is positively related to non-electoral participation in
contacting politicians, working with a group, and even protesting. Socio-
economic development is also positively related to both turnout statistics,
but its relationship with most other forms of political action is less distinct.
There is actually a negative relationship with campaign activity, and a strong
positive relationship with contacting a politician. We suspect that the effects
of socio-economic conditions overlap with other factors, and thus the impact
is diffused in these simple bivariate correlations.
The aggregate results above give us an initial indication of how the national-
level political and socio-economic contexts shape citizen participation. In
this section, we further flush out these relationships with multilevel logistic
regression analyses, while also controlling for individual-level predictors of
participation. We present two models for each type of participation.11 Model
1 for each participation type includes the micro-level variables and just the
macro-level factors tapping Lijphart’s distinction between consensual and
majoritarian systems (Bernauer et al., this volume), the exception being voter
turnout where we also control for compulsory voting laws.12 Model 2 for each
type adds additional macro-level factors. Because of multicollinearity and
overlapping theoretical expectations, we use a subset of the other macro-level
variables not captured well by the two Lijphart dimensions. Specifically, we
test for party system polarization, the distinction between new and estab-
lished democracies, GDP per capita (1,000s), and the type of election in the
study (legislative only, presidential only, and legislative and presidential
simultaneously; legislative only is the reference category).
At the micro level, we include indicators for each of the major theoretical
perspectives discussed in the literature review section: motivation/
psychological engagement and efficacy (democratic satisfaction, feel repre-
sented by a party, party identification, left–right ideological extremism, and
123
Steven Weldon and Russell Dalton
124
Table 7.3. Multilevel logit models of political activism
1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2
Constant –1.30** –1.98** –3.14** –3.49** –4.66** –3.99** –4.60** –4.96** –3.45** –3.58** –3.46** –4.62**
Satisfaction with democracy 0.10** 0.10** –0.05** –0.05** –0.03 –0.03 –0.14** –0.14** –0.16** –0.16** –0.20** –0.20**
Feel represented 0.59** 0.59** 0.49** 0.49** 0.50** 0.50** 0.09* 0.09* 0.24** 0.24** 0.14** 0.14**
group activity, and protest. There are some exceptions. Consistent with previ-
ous research, older people are more likely to vote but generally less likely to
engage in other forms of participation. It also appears males, while no more
likely to vote, are more likely to engage in all other types of participation.
Finally, party mobilization efforts are strongly linked to all forms of partici-
pation. This may be counterintuitive when thinking of institutionalized ver-
sus non-institutionalized types of participation. Taken together with those
for party identification and feeling represented by a political party, this find-
ing suggests that participation of all types, including protest activity, is large-
ly linked to and channelled through institutionalized political actors—that
is, it is the citizens who are connected to the political system in one form or
another who are most likely to engage in all forms of political activity. This
holds even if citizens are dissatisfied with government or the major political
party offerings.
Turning now to the macro-level effects, the findings are consistent with
those from the aggregate analyses above. The results for the executive–parties
dimension all point in the same direction—that is, consensualism, while pos-
sibly stimulating voter turnout, likely diminishes other forms of participa-
tion. Consensual democracies not only have lower levels of group activity
and protest, but more remarkably, they also have less campaign activity, and
citizens in these systems are less likely to try to persuade others how to vote.
These findings hold even when controlling for other macro-level factors. Fed-
eralism, in contrast, appears to stimulate non-voting forms of political action,
albeit the results do not reach conventional levels of statistical significance.
Nonetheless, there is some evidence that more elections with multiple veto
points encourage citizens to take a more active role in politics and engage in
high-intensity activities.
In terms of the other aspects of the macro-level context, we see that party
polarization appears to have little effect on participation patterns, once we
control for the individual-level predictors. This is somewhat surprising given
recent research pinpointing the significance of polarization; however, that
research suggests its effects may be largely conditional, interacting with
micro-level predictors to affect participation, which we do not have the space
in this chapter to explore fully (see Karp and Banducci 2008). Consistent with
previous studies, participation is also higher in established democracies, even
after controlling for individual-level factors. In contrast, we find little evi-
dence that the level of economic development affects participation. Finally,
the type of election clearly matters for participation. Except for persuasion,
participation is lowest in presidential-only elections and tends to be highest
when presidential and legislative elections are held simultaneously. This sug-
gests that participation increases with more important elections and more
opportunities or separate offices being contested.
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Democratic Structures and Democratic Participation
Finally, again, we should note that we have only tested for the direct contex-
tual effects in the current analysis. Previous research suggests that the key effects
of some of these factors may be either conditional or indirect, meaning they
primarily work to strengthen the psychological determinants of political partici-
pation among the electorate, such as party identification, feelings of efficacy, and
the feeling of being represented (see Karp and Banducci 2008; Van der Meer et al.
2009; Blais et al., in this volume). Nonetheless, the results from both the aggre-
gate and multilevel analyses provide an initial indication that consensualism has
different effects on voting versus non-voting modes of participation.
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Steven Weldon and Russell Dalton
128
Appendix A.7.1. CSES survey variables
Voted B3004: Did the respondent vote in the election? 0 = no, 1 = yes
Persuade others B3001_1: Here is a list of things some people do during elections. Which if any did you do during the 0 = no, 1 = yes
most recent election? . . . talked to other people to persuade them to vote for a particular party or
candidate?
Campaign activity B3001_2: [During the recent elections]. . .showed your support for a particular party or candidate by, 0 = no, 1 = yes
for example, attending a meeting, putting up a poster, or in some other way?
Notes
1. We examine only the direct effects of context variables, but current research sug-
gests that there are often strong interactions between context and individual-level
predictors of participation.
2. Being contacted by a political party is a very narrow definition of mobilization,
especially for non-conventional modes of participation. The CSES does query
membership in unions, professional associations, and religious attendance, but
these questions were not asked in every country, leading to significant missing
data. The ‘party contact’ variable does allow us to examine whether electoral and
non-electoral modes of political participation alike are influenced by party activ-
ity, but we should be cautious in interpreting as an indicator of social networking
effects more generally.
3. We use the June 2007 release of the data that we acquired through the CSES web-
site (<http://www.cses.org>). The data reflect the combined efforts of the scholars
who collected these surveys, but we are responsible for the analyses and interpre-
tations presented here. We do not include Kyrgyzstan or Hong Kong because these
were non-democratic elections; we also deleted the entries for non-electoral par-
ticipation in Korea because of apparent errors in these data. The multiple regres-
sion models excluded the following countries for the reasons in parentheses:
Taiwan 2001 and 2004 (federal–unitary dimension missing, and feel represented
by a party); Belgium 2003 (income missing); and Japan 2004 (contacted by party
missing). South Korea has missing data for the following dependent variables—
contacting a politician or party, working in a group, and protesting. We also cor-
rected errors in the New Zealand ‘persuade others’ question in the CSES release.
This leaves us with 33 countries for the multilevel models of voting, campaign
activity, and persuading others, and 32 countries (excluding South Korea) for con-
tacting a politician, working in a group, and protesting.
4. The participation questions are not identical across nations, which can distort the
specific national percentages. Readers should consult the CSES documentation on
their website for the specific question variations (<http://www.cses.org/>). In
addition, the framework of the survey (panel versus cross-section, and the mode
of interviewing) may affect participation statistics. Panel surveys, for instance,
typically have higher participation rates because of differential response rates by
people interested in politics.
5. These results are available from the authors upon request.
6. The average turnout from IDEA is 68 per cent; self-reported turnout in the CSES
averages 84 per cent.
7. A principal components analysis yielded the following loadings for a first unro-
tated dimension (49.5 per cent of total variance):
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Democratic Structures and Democratic Participation
131
8
8.1 Introduction
132
Feeling Policy Represented
perceive how their political views are represented by the politicians they elect
to represent them.
133
Sören Holmberg
policy wishes for the future are what count, while voter evaluations of past
policies are most important in the Sanction Model. But in a broader perspec-
tive both models concur. It is the will of the people that should be
represented.
In a party-based Mandate Model, usually called The Responsible Party Model,
political parties formulate future-oriented programmes ahead of elections
which voters choose between (APSA 1950; Thomassen 1994). People are issue
voting on the party closest to their own views. They give their consent to a
party’s programme. The parties in turn are expected to work and try to imple-
ment the policies they have promised to pursue. Focus is on issue opinions.
Elections are supposed to bring about a high degree of congruence between
party policies and party voters’ views. In the model, voter consent to party
mandates is the mechanism that ideally brings about policy representation
and assures that the will of the people be done.
The approach of the Sanction Model is somewhat different. Focus is on
retrospective evaluations of government and party actions. Voters give con-
sent or dissent to what has passed, not to what is promised. Yet in this process
voters’ political views are not irrelevant. On the contrary, people’s opinions
affect how they judge what has been done, in much the same way as people’s
opinions affect how they judge the programme of parties in the Mandate
Model. Political views play a decisive role when people give a government or
a party a positive or a negative sanction.
Governments who successfully anchor their policies among voters increase
their possibilities of receiving a positive sanction come election time. Parties
and governments do the anchoring through opinion formation and policy
positioning between elections in order to maximize policy congruence with
voters, thus minimizing the risk of a negative sanction at the polls. But the
process requires that politicians know what people want and how people
value what they receive.
Anticipation is the name of the technique politicians employ when they
try to know public opinion and to foresee how people react. Being successful
at knowing the people is a necessary art form in a democracy. As a matter of
fact, elite anticipation in combination with elections is the device that in the
best of worlds assures that the will of the people is implemented in the Sanc-
tion Model. Politicians read what people want and, if need be, adjust their
policies to avoid losing in the next election. The threat of losing makes elect-
ed representatives amend their policies to secure re-election.
Consequently and indirectly, a high degree of policy agreement between
voters and politicians becomes a vital ingredient even in the Sanction Model;
arguably not as central as in the Mandate Model, but still essential. The main
purpose of the Mandate Model as well as of the Sanction Model is the num-
ber-one goal of a democratic system—to fulfil the will of the people.
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Feeling Policy Represented
The distinction between the Mandate and Sanction Models is related to the
difference between two other celebrated models in democracy research.
Those models are the Majoritarian and the Consensus Models, most famous-
ly proposed by Arend Lijphart (1975, 1984, 1999).
The Majoritarian Model, which has the selection of majority government as
the fundamental building block, is a distant cousin to the Sanction Model. In
both models clarity of the choice and the possibility to hold parties and gov-
ernment accountable play an essential role (Thomassen, this volume,
Chapter 1). And like in the Sanction Model, majority governments governing
with the consent of the people and with policies congruent with what people
want run a small risk of being served a negative sanction and being defeated
come election time. Thus, knowing what people want and trying to pursue
policies in accordance are of the essence in the Majoritarian Model.
The Consensus Model has a distant cousin too and that is the Mandate
Model. The major function of the Consensus Model is to bring about a close
resemblance between elected politicians and the electorate. Parliaments and
parties should be as representative of the voters as possible. Ideally, voters’
social characteristics as well as policy views should be mirrored among the
elected representatives in parliament. And when that is the case, representa-
tive bodies rule with the implicit consent of the people; and they have a
mandate to act on behalf of the people.
As Jacques Thomassen points out in Chapter 1, the prime purpose of elec-
tions in the Majoritarian Model is the accountability function, while the
prime purpose is the representation function in the Consensus Model. But in
both models, policy agreement between voters and politicians is important;
admittently somewhat more so in the Consensus Model than in the Majori-
tarian Model. However, and also pointed out by Thomassen, in majoritarian
systems focus is on mandate to and accountability of the government while in
consensus systems representativeness of and mandate to elected members of
parliament is the primary objective.
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Sören Holmberg
uring a longer period are expected to exhibit higher degrees of issue congru-
d
ence between voters and elected representatives compared to newer democ-
racies where elections are a more recent tool. An electoral democracy is not
born fix and ready. It takes time and practice to make the democratic engine
work well. And this irrespective of what kind of democratic system we
deal with.
Our second main hypothesis, however, is not unrelated to how the dem-
ocratic system is constructed. On the contrary, we want to systematically
contrast the democratic models we have discussed previously. In much of
the relevant literature, the Consensus Model is found to perform better in
most democratic respects than the Majoritarian Model (Lijphart 1999;
Powell 2000). Examples of democratic aspects being studied are the link
between public opinion and public policies, satisfaction with the working
of democracy, electoral turnout, and women’s representation. Conse-
quently, our hypothesis is that systems employing the Consensus Model
should on average exhibit higher degrees of policy representation between
legislators and the public than systems characterized by the Majoritarian
Model.
In the empirical test we operationalize the Majoritarian Model as countries
using a plurality/majority electoral system while countries having propor-
tional voting systems are classified as belonging to the Consensus Model fam-
ily. Possible causal mechanisms are more cohesive parties and a stronger
emphasis on representation according to the Mandate Model in consensus
systems compared to a clearer focus on individual candidates and strong gov-
ernments in majoritarian systems.
Another alternative operationalization that also will be employed builds on
one of Vatter and Bernauer’s indices of consensus–majoritarian democracy—
the executive–parties dimension. It is a composite index encompassing the
effective number of parties, cabinet-type, executive–legislative relations, and
electoral disproportionality (Vatter and Bernauer 2011; see also Chapter 2).
The two auxiliary hypotheses deal with the difference between representa-
tion through political parties and representation through political leaders.
Which is better for high degrees of policy representation, collective represen-
tation via parties or individual representation via leaders? Notwithstanding
the relevance of the question, we will not be able to answer it in any direct
way. However, indirectly it is possible to shed some light on it. We can do that
by entertaining two hypotheses. The first being that policy representation
among citizens in majoritarian systems is perceived as better channelled
through leaders than through parties. In consensus systems, we expect the
opposite—that voters should perceive better policy congruence via political
parties than via political leaders.
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Feeling Policy Represented
137
Sören Holmberg
Thomassen 1999). Not very uplifting results. It is only the Swedish outcome
with a low refusal rate of 10 per cent which is fully acceptable. The results for
the other countries run the risk of ending up unduly shaky with such large
refusal rates among the politicians.
Things are no better across the Atlantic. In a comparative study in the 1980s
in which the USA participated, the refusal rate among members of the House
of Representatives was 71 per cent (Miller et al. 1999): about as bad as for
many European countries.
A Nordic study in the 1990s yielded somewhat better outcomes, although
not quite good enough in all countries. The refusals among legislators were
39 per cent in Finland, 37 per cent in Denmark, 28 per cent in Iceland, 12 per
cent in Norway, and 4 per cent in Sweden (Esaiasson and Heidar 2000). All
outcomes are decent but it is only the participant rate in Norway and Sweden
which is good.
The high rates of elite participation in Swedish parliamentary surveys are
not unique to the two referred studies. In a series of eight Riksdag Surveys that
the Swedish National Election Studies have conducted since the late 1960s,
the refusal rate has never exceeded 11 per cent (Holmberg 1974; Roth 1996;
Esaiasson and Holmberg 1996; Brothén and Holmberg 2010). The most recent
study was done in 2010 (Wängnerud, Esaiasson, Gilljam and Holmberg 2010).
Such is the comparative research situation on issue representation—a very
limited number of empirical studies and potentially unreliable results due to
a lack of good elite access. Yet, if we have to appreciate what we have, what
are the results? The simple answer is that the differences we find in levels of
policy congruence between citizens and politicians are not very pronounced
across different national systems (Miller et al. 1999; Schmitt and Thomassen
1999; Esaiasson and Heidar 2000).
A similar conclusion is valid when we compare countries with different
electoral systems. Issue agreement in the USA with a plurality-based electoral
system is no lower than in countries like Sweden and the Netherlands which
employ proportional systems. France, with a majoritarian system, exhibits
about the same degree of issue congruence as Germany, with its mixed elec-
toral system (Holmberg 1999). Thus, the hypotheses that countries using
majoritarian electoral systems should have lower levels of issue agreement
between voters and politicians compared to countries with proportional sys-
tems is not founded given these results.
Other studies in the tradition of opinion-policy research have indicated a
better fit between public opinion and policy outcomes in proportional sys-
tems compared to majoritarian systems, thus rendering support to the
hypotheses (Powell 2000). But there are also studies pointing at better poli-
cy representation in majoritarian systems than in proportional (Pierce
1999; Wessels 1999). In a very ambitious and pathbreaking study of how
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Feeling Policy Represented
139
Sören Holmberg
Table 8.1. Citizens in 35 countries judge the level of issue agreement between voters
and elected representatives in their own country
Country Election system Very well Rather well Sum Mean Percentage
percentage Don’t know
1. Denmark PR 14 66 80 2,09 5
2. USA Plurality/majority 13 59 72 2,20 3
3. Ireland PR 8 57 65 2,34 8
4. Spain PR 4 61 65 2,39 9
5. Belgium PR 4 60 64 2,41 11
6. Netherlands PR 6 52 58 2,41 2
7. Switzerland PR 2 57 59 2,42 9
8. Sweden PR 2 56 58 2,42 8
9. Australia Plurality/majority 7 49 56 2,44 0
10. France Plurality/majority 4 56 60 2,45 1
11. Philippines Mixed 7 51 58 2,46 0
12. New Zealand Mixed 6 49 55 2,47 0
13. Iceland PR 4 51 55 2,48 16
14. Bulgaria PR 14 38 52 2,49 43
15. Taiwan Mixed 4 47 51 2,52 14
16. Hungary Mixed 3 48 51 2,52 6
17. Great Britain Plurality/majority 3 46 49 2,55 0
18. Finland PR 2 46 48 2,55 3
19. Poland PR 6 43 49 2,56 12
20. Romania PR 10 28 38 2,56 41
21. Germany Mixed 1 47 48 2,58 0
22. Chile PR 6 38 44 2,59 4
23. Mexico Mixed 10 37 47 2,61 7
24. Italy Mixed 3 43 46 2,63 17
25. Israel PR 4 43 47 2,64 7
26. Albania Mixed 4 40 44 2,65 4
27. Canada Plurality/majority 2 39 41 2,65 0
28. Russia Mixed 1 42 43 2,67 29
29. Portugal PR 1 37 38 2,70 25
30. Peru PR 9 30 39 2,74 8
31. Kyrgyzstan Plurality/majority 2 33 35 2,74 20
32. Slovenia PR 3 25 28 2,78 1
33. Japan Mixed 1 24 25 2,86 0
34. Czech Republic PR 1 27 28 2,90 15
35. Brazil PR 4 25 29 2,94 5
Mean 35 countries 5 47 52 2,55 10
Question: Considering how elections in (country . . . ) usually work in your view, to what extent do elections result in
members of parliament having views mirroring what voters want very well, rather well, not particularly well, not well
at all?”
Comments: The results come from The Comparative Study of Elections (CSES) involving voter surveys in the years
2002–2004. The election systems have been classified according to IDEA’s handbook Electoral System: The New Inter-
national IDEA Handbook (2005). The means can vary between very well (1) and not well at all (4); thus, low means
indicate high levels of issue agreement. Percentages have been computed among respondents who answered the
question.
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Feeling Policy Represented
extent to which citizens perceive that elections bring about issue agreement
between voters and elected representatives. The response alternatives are four
from very and rather well to not particularly well and not well at all. Observe
that the question, strictly speaking, measures perceptions of representation,
not feelings of representation. Yet the border between perception and feeling
is arguable.
A reasonable level for a passing grade is that a majority of citizens in a coun-
try perceive that they are policy represented by their elected politicians. In
our case this is operationalized as when a majority of citizens recognize that
their parliamentarians very well or rather well represent the views of the
voters.
The results show that a majority of countries did not achieve a passing
grade. It was close to a majority, though. In 16 out of 35 countries a majority
of citizens did perceive their elected legislators as mirroring the views of vot-
ers very or rather well. However, the average result across the 35 countries is
just over the passing bar with a mean of 52.
At the top of the list we find countries like Denmark and the USA with
80 and 72 per cent, respectively, of their citizens indicating that elected
politicians represent the views of people very or rather well. At the bottom
are countries like Brazil, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and Japan. In these
countries, only between 25 and 27 per cent of the citizens feel that their
parliamentarians represent the opinions of people very or rather well.
Toward the middle of the list we find countries like Great Britain and Fin-
land, but also Hungary and Taiwan. About 50 per cent of the citizens in
these countries perceive their politicians to be very or rather representa-
tive of the views of people. Sweden is located on the upper half (rank 8)
with 58 per cent of the respondents indicating that the members of the
Riksdag represent the opinions of Swedes very or rather well. Neighbour-
ing Russia on the other hand ends up in the lower half (rank 28) with only
43 per cent of Russians feeling that their politicians’ views represent them
very or rather well.
Eyeballing the results does not reveal any evident patterns except perhaps
that a number of old established democracies tend to be placed high on the
list, while many new democracies end up toward the bottom. The more for-
mal hypothesis testing later in Table 8.3 will discern that this impression is
warranted. Citizens in older democracies do indeed feel more policy repre-
sented than people in emerging democracies.
Politicians in established democracies tend to concur. They too have a posi-
tive, although perhaps exaggerated, opinion of how well they represent their
voters. The CSES question on perceptions of the level of policy representation
has as well been put to members of the parliaments in Germany and Sweden
(Wessels 2004; Brothén and Holmberg 2010). Among members in Sweden as
141
Sören Holmberg
many as 81 per cent answered that the policy representation was very or
rather good. In Germany the result was 79 per cent. Voters in the two coun-
tries were less positive with 58 per cent among Swedes and 48 per cent among
Germans recognizing that their politicians were very or rather representative
of the views of the voters. To a degree members have a tendency to stray
towards wishful thinking (Holmberg 1999). Voters are more cynical or per-
haps more realistic.
The operative mechanism behind the fact that older democracies more
than young democracies have citizens who feel that they are better policy
represented by their elected representatives does not necessarily have any-
thing to do with the time factor or more experience. Notwithstanding that
practice increases skills, it is naïve to presuppose that higher levels of policy
representation would evolve in any automatic fashion over time or as a result
of voters and politicians encountering each other often in elections. There is
a multitude of other factors besides experience that play a role. It is rather
self-evident that levels of policy representation can increase as well as decrease
across time.
Sweden can serve as an illustrative example. The world’s longest time series
on policy representation between citizens and elected parliamentarians is
available for the Swedish case. And what we are talking about now is not
measures of feelings of being represented. What we are talking about are ‘real’
measures of policy representation between elite and mass. Beginning in
1968–9 and fairly regularly since then, members of the Riksdag and eligible
voters have been surveyed on identical issue questions numbering between
12 and 20 on the different study occasions.
Methodologically, the results from the oldest study in 1968–9 are not quite
comparable with later results. All issue questions were not identically formu-
lated and face-to-face interviews were used instead of mail questionnaires as
in the later studies. Thus, the comparatively low level of policy congruence
registered for 1968–9 must be interpreted with some caution, although the
result does not differ that much from the outcome of the later studies (Holm-
berg 1974). The comparability is better for the later studies starting in 1985
and going up to 2006.
The results (see Figure 8.1) indicate a fairly stable level of policy representa-
tion between people and politicians in the old established Swedish democ-
racy over the last 40 years. If there is any trend, however, it is not toward
increased levels of policy representation. Quite the opposite, there is a slight
tendency toward less policy representation if we compare the results in the
1980s and early 1990s with the last results in 2002 and 2006. Issue congru-
ence between citizens and elected politicians in Sweden has not improved
during the last 25 years. It has become slightly worse.
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Feeling Policy Represented
The interview question on how people perceive the level of policy representa-
tion in their country is focused on the national parliament as a whole and on
all members. The question is not focused on what people de facto vote for, e.g.
political parties, candidates, and possibly also party leaders. Since it is quite
feasible to judge policy representation through parliament as a whole as want-
ing at the same time as policy representation via a party, a candidate, or a leader
is perceived as acceptable or even good, we might have a problem.2 However,
the problematique is noticed and to a degree covered in the CSES project. Two
special interview questions on party and party leader representation are includ-
ed in the questionnaires. Yet a third possible question covering representation
through individual candidates is not included in the CSES study.
The questions were phrased thus: ‘Would you say that any of the parties in
(country . . .) represent your points of view reasonably well?’ followed by
‘Irrespective of what you think about the parties, would you say there is any
party leader that represents your views reasonably well?’ For both questions,
the response alternatives were dichotomous yes or no. The results presented
in Table 8.2 confirm the suspicion that it would be common to perceive par-
ties and party leader as more policy representative than the entire parliament.
After all, you vote for a party or a leader, not for the parliament as a whole.
143
Sören Holmberg
Table 8.2. The feeling of being policy represented by a party or a party leader among
citizens in 35 countries
Question: Would you say that any of the parties in (country . . . ) represent your views reasonably well? Response alter-
natives: yes or no.
Question: Disregarding what you think of the parties, would you say that any party leader represents your views rea-
sonably well? Response alternatives: yes or no.
Comments: Based on CSES data; see Table 8.1. Percentages have been computed among respondents who answered
the questions. Non-response is on average below 10 per cent for both questions. The countries have been rank-
ordered according to the results on the party question.
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Feeling Policy Represented
145
Sören Holmberg
Table 8.3. Assessing policy representation among citizens in old and young democracies
Type of democracy Perceive that citizens’ Consider that a party Consider that a party
opinions are very or represents their views leader represents their
rather well represented views
by members of national
parliaments
Old established 59 75 70
democracies
New established 45 65 60
democracies
New emerging 42 43 51
democracies
Comments: See Tables 8.1 and 8.2. Classified as old established democracies are: Denmark, USA, Ireland, Belgium,
France, Switzerland, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Finland, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Canada (14
countries). New established democracies are: Spain, Germany, Portugal, Israel, Italy, Japan (six countries). New
emerging democracies are: Bulgaria, Taiwan, Hungary, Poland, Mexico, Brazil, Czech Republic, Philippines, Chile,
Albania, Russia, Peru, Kyrgyzstan, Slovenia, Romania (15 countries). The percentages in the table are averages.
Election system Perceive that citizens’ Consider that a party Consider that a party
opinions are very or represents their views leader represents their
rather well represented views
by members of national
parliaments
Plurality/majority 52 65 69
Mixed 47 53 55
Proportional 50 61 59
Comments: See Tables 8.1 and 8.2. The number of plurality/majority systems is six, the number of mixed systems is
ten, while the number of proportional systems is 19. The percentages in the table are averages.
146
Feeling Policy Represented
Table 8.5. Feeling policy represented among citizens in countries along Vatter’s and
Bernauer’s executives–parties dimension
High values/ 52 64 60
consensus democracy
Middle values 44 58 61
Low values/majoritarian 55 60 59
democracy
147
Sören Holmberg
consensus democracies (52 per cent). They are somewhat more prevalent
among citizens in majoritarian democracies (55 per cent). There is no doubt.
Our hypothesis number two has not survived the empirical tests.
The same strong conclusion cannot be drawn when it comes to how citi-
zens assess policy representation through parties or through leaders; but
almost. There are some differences between how people living in countries
with different election systems judge policy representation via parties or via
leaders, but the differences are not very impressive. Yet what differences there
are, are in accordance with the hypothesis (Table 8.4). Citizens in majoritari-
an systems to a somewhat larger extent perceive successful leader representa-
tion than successful party representation. Citizens in proportional systems
tend to do the opposite evaluation. On average, they marginally put party
representation ahead of leader representation. Thus, our first auxiliary
hypothesis is confirmed, although just barely.
The word ‘barely’ should perhaps be emphasized. Studying the results from
the test using the executive–parties measurements reveals an even weaker
support for the hypothesis (see Table 8.5). Here, as before, more people in
consensus democracies view party representation as successful compared to
leader representation (64 vs 60 per cent). But among citizens in majoritarian
democracies feelings of being policy represented are not more common when
it comes to leaders (59 per cent) than when it comes to parties (60 per cent).
The difference is miniscule, but opposite to the hypothesis. Consequently,
our first auxiliary hypothesis is only partially and barely supported.
The support for the second auxiliary hypothesis is stronger. On average,
citizens in old established democracies put party representation ahead of
leader representation, while citizens in new emerging democracies tend to
put leader representation ahead of party representation. The evaluation of
party representation differs most markedly. Among citizens in old established
democracies an average of 75 per cent perceive party representation as suc-
cessful in achieving policy representation between voters and elected politi-
cians. The corresponding result for citizens in new emerging democracies is
much lower, only 43 per cent.
The result underscores that it takes time to establish a well-functioning
party-based democracy. Policy representation through parties is less ‘natural’
and more complicated to bring about than representation through leaders.
Thus, it takes more time and resources to make it work.
Our finding that the age of democracy plays a decisive role when citizens get
to be policy represented by their elected leaders needs a tougher test. Before
148
Feeling Policy Represented
149
150
Sören Holmberg
Table 8.6. Multilevel regression analysis of the impact of individual- and system-level characteristics on citizens’ perceptions of being policy
represented by elected representatives in their own countries
Bivariate Multivariate
Regr Std Regr Std Regr Std Regr Std Regr Std
Coeff Err Coeff Err Coeff Err Coeff Err Coeff Err
System-level variables
Age of democr. rule –0.23*** 0.05 –0.23*** 0.06 –0.24*** 0.06 – – –0.19** .06
Electoral system design + 0.04 0.08 –0.02 0.07 – – – – – –
Consensus–majorit. democr. + 0.05 0.08 – – 0.05 0.07 – – – –
Individual-level variables
Left–right congruence 0.15*** 0.02 – – – – 0.11*** 0.03 0.11*** .03
Government party support –0.19*** 0.01 – – – – –0.15*** 0.01 –0.15*** .01
Party ID –0.19*** 0.01 – – – – –0.14*** 0.01 –0.14*** .01
Constant – – 20.69*** 20.65*** 20.61*** 20.71***
Number of countries – – 35 33 29 29
Number of individuals – – 51,553 48,208 25,280 25,117
Appr. R2 0.14 = 22% 0.15 = 17% 0.16 = 11% 0.14 = 22%
151
Sören Holmberg
Notes
152
9
Output-oriented Legitimacy:
Individual- and System-level Influences
on Democracy Satisfaction
David Sanders, Harold Clarke, Marianne Stewart, and Paul Whiteley
9.1 Introduction
153
David Sanders, Harold Clarke, Marianne Stewart, and Paul Whiteley
systems aimed at increasing the overall level of regime satisfaction. The first
part of the chapter (Section 9.2) describes the core measure of democracy
satisfaction that is employed here and outlines the way in which it varies
both across countries and over time. Section 9.3 reviews the various theoreti-
cal claims that have been made about the sources of regime and democracy
satisfaction among mass publics. Section 9.4 specifies a model of democracy
satisfaction that enables these claims to be systematically evaluated. In
Section 9.5 we report our empirical results.
154
mean of demsat mean of demsat
0
1
2
3
0
1
2
3
19 19
7 7
19 5 19 6
7 7
19 6 19 7
7 78
19 7 19
7 7
19 8 19 9
7 8
19 9 19 0
8 8
19 0 19 1
8 8
19 1 19 2
8 8
19 2 19 3
8 8
19 3 19 4
8 8
07
Output-oriented Legitimacy
155
Figure 9.1b. Average democracy satisfaction in (six) founder EU member states and
David Sanders, Harold Clarke, Marianne Stewart, and Paul Whiteley
Percentage
process in their respective countries, with only 11 per cent declaring them-
selves ‘not at all satisfied’. Figure 9.2 shows how the distribution of satisfac-
tion varied across the CSES sample of countries, presenting average scores on
the 1–4-point democracy satisfaction scale. As the figure indicates, Denmark
(mean = 3.27) displays the highest overall satisfaction levels, followed by Aus-
tralia (2.98) and the United States (2.97). The top ten countries are all either
Western European or North American. The countries with the lowest satisfac-
tion levels are mostly ‘new’ democracies like Bulgaria (1.83) and Brazil (2.05),
though Italy (2.26), Israel (2.26), and Switzerland (2.33) all score relatively
poorly given their relatively long-standing status as democratic systems.
Germany also scores relatively modestly (2.45) given its strong democratic
record since the late 1940s. However, it is evident from Eurobarometer data
that overall German satisfaction levels fell after unification: prior to 1990,
(West) German satisfaction levels were close to the West European average
(see Appendix A.9.1).
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Output-oriented Legitimacy
3,5
3
2,5
2
1,5
1
0,5
0
denmark
australia
usa
ireland
norway
sweden
spain
canada
britain
finland
new zealand
chile
iceland
japan
belgium
netherlands
taiwan
france
philipines
germany
romania
hungary
czech
switzerland
portugal
poland
israel
italy
peru
albania
russia
korea
mexico
brazil
bulgaria
Figure 9.2. Average satisfaction with democracy on 1–4 scale, CSES Wave 2 countries
maximize their expected utility, most citizens must devote large amounts of
time to collecting and analysing all of the information that might be relevant
to the choices that they make. Rather, rational citizens frequently use heuris-
tics or cognitive shortcuts in order to make decisions where they have rela-
tively limited information (Popkin 1991; Lupia and McCubbins 1998). Thus,
for example, a rational voter might decide between competing parties on the
basis of her/his assessment of the likely competence of the rival party leaders.
In these circumstances, rather than making a detailed analysis of the policy
positions and delivery capabilities of the rival parties, s/he would be using the
heuristic of ‘leader images’ in order to make a ‘limited information’ but none-
theless rational choice (Lupia, McCubbins and Popkin 2000).
Using these sorts of cognitive shortcuts, one obvious way in which citizens
might evaluate the quality of the democratic process in their respective coun-
tries is through their assessments of the performance of the incumbent govern-
ment. In Easton’s terms, the more that the ‘political authorities’ can deliver
desirable policy goals, the more likely it is that citizens will develop positive
evaluations of the regime itself (Easton 1965; Kornberg and Clarke 1992).
There is certainly evidence from individual country studies to suggest that
‘valenced’ judgements about incumbent party policy delivery are positively
linked to satisfaction with democracy (see, for example, Clarke et al. 2004,
2009). The simple hypothesis tested here is that, independently of national
context, democracy satisfaction will be positively affected by citizens’ assess-
ments of overall government performance (H1.1). A second set of potential
individual-level influences on democracy satisfaction relates to citizens’ eval-
uations of the extent to which domestic political institutions represent their
views and interests. The sense that citizens are ‘represented’ by those in polit-
ical power is a central tenet of all democratic theory (Weale 2005). If citizens
feel that existing political institutions fail to reflect and represent their inter-
ests, then the legitimacy of the political system as a whole is likely to be
brought into question. In contrast, if citizens believe that these institutions
157
David Sanders, Harold Clarke, Marianne Stewart, and Paul Whiteley
do effectively represent their concerns, then they are more likely to consider
that the state wields legitimate authority—they are more likely to be satisfied
with the democratic process. The hypothesis here is that the more an indi-
vidual feels represented by existing political institutions, the more likely s/he
is to be satisfied with democracy (H1.2). A third set of individual influences
focuses on citizens’ beliefs about the ability of the state to deliver desirable
democratic goals or values, such as the protection of human rights and the pre-
vention or avoidance of political and financial corruption (Powell 2000). The
more citizens perceive that the existing regime delivers these values, the more
likely they are to regard the existing regime as legitimate and accordingly to
lend it their democratic support. In short, there should be a positive relation-
ship between democracy satisfaction and the belief that the current regime
effectively delivers democratic values (H1.3). Note finally that individual
demographic characteristics—age, sex, education, religion, and so on—might
also affect people’s satisfaction with democracy. In general, we make no par-
ticular assumptions about the form that any such effects might take, though,
as discussed in the next section, our operational model takes full account of
the effects of these characteristics as control variables.3
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Output-oriented Legitimacy
159
David Sanders, Harold Clarke, Marianne Stewart, and Paul Whiteley
160
Output-oriented Legitimacy
161
David Sanders, Harold Clarke, Marianne Stewart, and Paul Whiteley
There are broadly two ways of specifying models using the sort of multilevel
data typical of the CSES dataset. Traditional multilevel models involve, in
effect, the specification of two statistical models—one for the effects on the
dependent variable of predictors that are measured at the individual level;
and one for the effects on the coefficients of the individual-level model of
predictors that are measured only at the aggregate, country level. A second,
simpler approach—which is adopted here—is to estimate the effects of both
individual-level and aggregate-level effects on individual variations in the
dependent variable simultaneously, but to take explicit account of the fact
that the data are clustered by country.
This latter approach ensures that the correct (robust) standard errors are
used for estimating the significance of aggregate-level effects. It also has the
advantage of interpretative simplicity, particularly in terms of comparing the
relative explanatory power of individual and aggregate effects on the depend-
ent variable.5
Taking account of the various hypotheses that were advanced above, our
model of democracy satisfaction takes the following general form:
Democracy Satisfactioni = b0 + Σb1–5 Individual Political Perceptionsi
+ Σb6–8 Individual Demographic Controlsi
+ Σb9–k Institutional/System Characteristicsj
+ Σbk–m Interactions between Individual Perceptions
of Government Performance and Institutional/System
Characteristicsij + eij (1)
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Output-oriented Legitimacy
where the i and subscripts and eij are as defined in [1]; b1–b5 are expected to be
significant and positive; there are no expectations for the signs or significance
levels for the demographic controls b6–b8; a negative sign is expected for b9;
positive signs are expected for the two consensualism terms, b10 and b11; and
there are no expectations for signs or significance levels of the interaction
terms, b12 and b13. Note that the coefficients b12 and b13 on the interaction
terms indicate the shift away from the ‘parent’ government performance
coefficient, b1, for the specified macro-level characteristic.6
The second variant of [1] considers the effects of formal electoral rules and
whether or not a country is a ‘new’ democracy. We accordingly substitute
plurality/not and new democracy/not for the two Lijphart measures of
163
David Sanders, Harold Clarke, Marianne Stewart, and Paul Whiteley
where all terms and expectations for b1–b9 are as in [2]; b10 and b11 are both
expected to be negative; there are no prior expectations for b12; and b13 is
expected to be positive.
Our final variant focuses on the consequences of electoral rules rather than
on their character. Accordingly we substitute terms for disproportionality
and clarity of responsibility in the third and fourth segments as follows:
Democracy Satisfactioni = b0 + Σb1–5 Individual Political Perceptionsi
+ Σb6–8 Individual Demographic characteristicsi + b9 National
Unemployment Ratej
+ b10 High Disproportionality/notj + b11 High Clarity/notj
+ b12 GovernmentPerformance*High Disproportionality/notij
+ b13 GovernmentPerformance*High Clarity/notij + eij(4)
where all terms and expectations for b1–b9 are as in [2]; b10 and b13 are both
expected to be negative; and b11 and b12 are expected to be positive.7
Table 9.2 indicates how each of the terms in equations [2]–[4] relates to the
hypotheses that were advanced earlier and reports the marginal distributions
of the operational variables across the CSES sample of countries considered
together. As the table indicates, H1.1 is tested using the respondent’s general
assessment of government performance. Hypotheses H1.2 and H1.3 are each
operationalized using two indicator measures: H1.2 by assessments of the con-
sequences of elections for representation and by whether or not the respond-
ent considers her/his own views to be represented by a particular political
party; and H1.3 by perceptions of the prevailing level of respect for individual
freedom and by assessments of political corruption. The remaining hypoth-
eses are tested using a single measure. H2.1 uses the standard CSES coding of
plurality electoral rules, where 1 denotes plurality rules and zero otherwise.8
The disproportionality index used in H2.2 reflects the difference between par-
ties’ shares of the popular vote and the shares of seats that they obtain in the
lower national assembly. The index ranges from a minimum 0.3 (for the
Netherlands), which indicates a high correspondence between vote and seat
shares and a low level of disproportionality, to a maximum of 7.1 (for the
UK), which indicates a high level of disproportionality.9 In order to simplify
164
Table 9.2. Descriptive characteristics of key predictors in democracy satisfaction model
Very bad job (1) Bad job (2) Good Job (3) Very Good job (4) N
Output-oriented Legitimacy
H2.4 New democracy 70.5 29.5 60651
Minimum Maximum Mean St. Deviation
H2.2 Disproportionality of votes 0 7.1 2.41 1.60 36
to seats
H2.3 Clarity of responsibility in 0 1 0.51 0.35 36
cabinet
H2.5 Unemployment rate 3 19.4 7.02 3.69 36
Lijphart federal–consensualism –1.43 2.25 0.00 1.00 35
Lijphart executive–consensualism –2.42 1.47 0.00 1.00 36
Note: Cell entries except where indicated are row percentages. Numbers in (brackets) indicate numerical codes assigned to each category in constructing independent variable measures.
Country scores on plurality, disproportionality, clarity of cabinet responsibility and new/old democracy are provided in Appendix A.9.2.
165
David Sanders, Harold Clarke, Marianne Stewart, and Paul Whiteley
the interpretation of the cross-level interaction terms, for our model estima-
tions we convert the disproportionality index into a dummy variable in
which countries above the mean (high disproportionality) are scored 1 and
those below the mean are scored 0. The clarity of responsibility variable used
to test H2.3 is a dummy, where 0 indicates that cabinet seats are shared among
more than one party and 1 indicates that only one party is represented in
cabinet and holds all the seats.10 Finally, H2.4 is tested using a simple dummy
variable that reflects whether the respondent lives in a new or an old democ-
racy, while H2.5 is tested using the national unemployment rate for the year in
which the relevant CSES survey was conducted.11
Table 9.2 also shows that the distributions of most of the predictor variables
are reasonably well dispersed. For example, in relation to general government
performance, roughly 53 per cent of respondents take a positive view com-
pared with 47 per cent who take a negative view. Similarly, some 71 per cent
consider that corruption is either ‘very’ or ‘quite’ widespread, compared with
29 per cent who think it is not. The table also shows (see the figures in brack-
ets) the numerical values assigned to the categories of each of the independ-
ent variables. Since the variables are all at quasi-interval level, all measures are
scored so that high values reflect agreement with or positive attitudes towards
the concept specified. Thus, for example, the belief that ‘Elections ensure vot-
ers views’ are very well represented by major parties’ is scored as 4, whereas the
belief that voters views’ are not at all well represented is scored as 1. Similarly,
the conviction that ‘Corruption among politicians’is very widespread is scored
as 4, whereas the view that corruption hardly happens at all is scored as 1. The
remaining, binary variables are scored as 0/1 dummies. Appendix A.9.2 reports
the actual country-by-country scores for each of our macro-level variables.
Tables 9.3 and 9.4 report the bivariate relationships between democracy sat-
isfaction and, respectively, the individual-level and macro-level predictor
variables from equations [2]–[4]. Table 9.3 shows the simple bivariate correla-
tions between the four-point democracy satisfaction scale and each of the
individual-level predictors. The correlations are all significant at p < 0.0001,
though this is to be expected with such a large number of cases.
The observed relationships are consistent with all of the individual-level
hypotheses outlined in H1.1–H1.3. The government performance measure cor-
relates positively with democracy satisfaction, providing initial support for
H1.1. Similarly, the two representation measures both correlate positively with
democracy satisfaction, indicating preliminary support for H1.2. This pattern
of preliminary support also extends to the regime performance measures. As
166
Output-oriented Legitimacy
Democracy satisfaction
H1.3 anticipates, the ‘respect for freedom and human rights’ scale correlates
positively with democracy satisfaction, whereas the ‘corruption is wide-
spread’ scale correlates negatively.
Table 9.4 yields a more modest set of preliminary conclusions with regard
to the macro-level correlates of democracy satisfaction. Since the macro char-
acteristics are all dummy variables, the table reports simple difference of
means t-tests. For comparability, the unemployment and Lijphart consensu-
alism variables referred in [1] are transformed into dummies, in which values
above the mean on each variable score 1 and all other values score 0. The
results, at best, lend only weak support to our initial set of macro-level hypoth-
eses. As the table shows, although there are minor variations in democracy
167
David Sanders, Harold Clarke, Marianne Stewart, and Paul Whiteley
satisfaction levels across the various types of system (e.g. PR systems on aver-
age score .10 points higher on the 1–4 scale than plurality systems, while
‘new’ democracies score 0.39 higher than ‘old’ ones), none of the differences is
statistically significant at conventional levels. In short, although the differences
shown in Table 9.4 are generally in the theoretically predicted direction, none
of them is substantial enough to provide clear support for any of the theoreti-
cal claims advanced earlier about direct macro-level effects.
The key question in these circumstances is whether or not any of these appar-
ently weak effects are strengthened when they are considered in a multivariate
context. Table 9.5 examines the relevant models—one for the Lijphart consen-
sualism terms (Model A); one for electoral rules and new/old democracy status
(Model B); and one for electoral outcomes (Model C). Since the democracy sat-
isfaction scale, strictly, is at ordinal level, the models respectively estimate equa-
tions [2]–[4] using ordered logit. As noted above, significance levels are estimated
using robust standard errors, with the data clustered by country.12 The table
reports one-tailed significance tests for all relationships where a clear direction-
al effect is hypothesized; two-tailed tests are reported otherwise. The models are
all reasonably well-determined, producing pseudo-R2 values of 0.17.13
Several general conclusions are suggested by the results reported in Table 9.5.
First, with regard to the hypothesized individual-level effects, H1.1 to H1.3 are
clearly confirmed in all three model specifications. As predicted, the govern-
ment performance terms (which vary between b = 0.82 and b = 0.84) and both
of the sense of representation terms provide significant positive coefficients.
The ‘Elections ensure voters are represented’ takes the same value (b = 0.51)
across all three equations and the ‘Party represents the respondent’s view’
term varies between b = 0.35 and b = 0.40. In relation to regime performance,
also as predicted, the ‘Respect for . . . human rights’ terms consistently yields
a positive effect (b = 0.68 across all three specifications) while the ‘Corruption’
term produces a negative effect (which varies between b = –0.36 and b = –0.42).
These results indicate that the individual-level calculus of satisfaction with
democracy is relatively straightforward. Satisfaction is maximized when citi-
zens perceive that their governments deliver on key policy goals; when they
feel they are represented by the major political parties; and when they con-
sider that regimes deliver respect for human rights and minimize corruption.
The second set of conclusions suggested by Table 9.5 relates to the macro-
level and cross-level sources of individual variations in democracy satisfaction.
Here, however, the pattern of significance in the coefficients varies consider-
ably across the three specifications. The results shown in Model A clearly
indicate that neither of the measures of consensualism exerts a significant
effect on democracy satisfaction. The non-significance of the corresponding
interactions between government performance and the executive and federal
consensualism terms also indicates that these regime characteristics do not
168
Table 9.5. Ordered logit models of democracy satisfaction
Output-oriented Legitimacy
H2.2: High disproportionality/not –0.93 0.48 0.027
H2.3: High clarity of responsibility/not 0.97 0.44 0.014
H2.5: National unemployment rate in survey –0.02 0.02 0.149 –0.00 0.03 0.451 –0.01 0.02 0.251
year
Cross-level interaction effects, H3.1–H3.4
Government performance* –0.04 0.05 0.147
executive–consensualism
Government performance* 0.06 0.07 0.314
federal–consensualism
H3.1: Government performance* new 0.11 0.20 0.296
democracy/not
169
170
Note: Robust Standard Errors reported for 35 clusters of countries. Significance levels report one-tailed test for all directional hypothesized relationship; two-tailed tests for others.
Output-oriented Legitimacy
171
David Sanders, Harold Clarke, Marianne Stewart, and Paul Whiteley
Two other sets of comments are in order about the Model C results. The first
is simply that the demographic control variables all fail to yield significant
coefficients—as they also fail to do in Models A and B. The second concerns
the precise interpretations of the cross-level interaction terms. Recall that
these interactions were included in the model specifications to incorporate
the idea that the effects of government performance vary across different
institutional contexts. That none of the cross-level terms in Models A and B
is significant means we can safely ignore the possible effects that they repre-
sent. In the context of Model C, it was expected that the effects of govern-
ment performance on democracy satisfaction would be stronger in high
disproportionality systems (H3.3) and weaker in high clarity systems (H3.2).
These predictions imply: (1) that the interaction term for government
performance*disproportionality should be significant and positive; and (2)
that the interaction term for government performance*clarity of responsibil-
ity should have a significant negative coefficient that is smaller in magnitude
than the (positive) ‘parent’ government performance coefficient.15 The results
shown in the table indicate that these expectations are borne out. The effect
of government performance on democracy satisfaction in low disproportion-
ality systems is b = 0.84; in high disproportionality systems it is b = (0.84 +
0.32 =)1.16. The countervailing effect of clarity in low clarity systems is b =
0.84; in high clarity systems it is b = (0.84–0.33=)0.51. In short, H3.2 and H3.3
are strongly supported by Model C.
Note, however, that one of the difficulties of using ordered logit as an estima-
tion tool—as with any form of logistic regression—is that the relative magni-
tudes of the various coefficients are not easy to interpret directly. For this reason,
Table 9.6 reports, for each independent variable in Table 9.5 Model C, the
changes in probabilities associated with moving from the predictor variable’s
minimum to maximum values whilst holding all other predictors constant at
their respective means. The results are highly instructive since they enable us to
assess the relative explanatory power of the different hypotheses that were
advanced earlier. The most obvious feature of the table is that the individual-
level predictors generally have larger impacts on the changes in probability
than the system-level structural features. The three largest effects—for govern-
ment performance (dp = 0.55), elections ensure representation (dp = 0.35), and
respect for human rights (dp = 0.36)—are all part of the individual-level calculus
of democracy satisfaction. For example, as an individual moves from registering
1 to registering 4 on the general government performance scale, s/he increases
her/his probability of being either very or fairly satisfied with democracy by
p = 0.55. Similar effects (though not quite as large) are also evident with regard
to the terms for regime performance and sense of representation. This is not to
say, however, that structural features of the regime do not matter. It is clear from
the dp values for disproportionality (–0.23) and for clarity of responsibility (0.21)
172
Output-oriented Legitimacy
Government performance
H1.1: Government performance assessments 1–4 0.55
Sense of representation
H1.2: Elections ensure voters are represented 1–4 0.35
H1.2: A party represents respondent’s 0–1 0.10
views/not
Regime performance
H1.3: Respect for freedom and human rights 1–4 0.36
in (nation)
H1.3: Corruption among politicians in 1–4 –0.27
(nation)
Regime characteristics
H2.2: Disproportionality of seat share/vote 0–1 –0.23
share
H2.3: Cabinet clarity of responsibility 0–1 0.22
Cross-level interactions
H3.2: Government performance*high 1–4 0.27
disproportionality
H3.2: Government performance*high clarity 1–4 –0.31
of responsibility
Demographic controls
Age 16–100 0.04
Male 0–1 0.00
Education 1–4 0.04
Note: Change in probability figures record the change in the probability that an individual will be satisfied with
democracy (either fairly or very satisfied) given a change in the independent variable from its minimum to its maxi-
mum possible value, holding all other variables constant at their respective means. Estimation using CLARIFY for
STATA (Tomz et al. 1999).
that these structural factors also have important effects. The disproportionality
effect implies that a person living in a high disproportionality system would be
p = 0.23 less likely to be satisfied with democracy than someone with an identi-
cal attitudinal and demographic profile in a majoritarian system. Yet before it is
immediately concluded that democracy satisfaction could straightforwardly be
increased by a move to a more proportional selectoral system, it needs to be
recognized that a similar effect in the opposite direction is evident with regard
to the impact of clarity of responsibility (dp = 0.22). Here, an increase from 0 to
1 on the clarity scale produces an increase in the probability of an individual
being satisfied with democracy. Given that greater clarity of responsibility is
typically associated with plurality rules (even though the bivariate correlation
between our measures of plurality and clarity is only r = 0.19), it is evident that
any consequent loss of clarity associated with the abandonment of plurality
would simultaneously serve to cancel out any benefits to democracy satisfac-
tion that might have been expected to derive from that abandonment.16
173
David Sanders, Harold Clarke, Marianne Stewart, and Paul Whiteley
174
Output-oriented Legitimacy
175
David Sanders, Harold Clarke, Marianne Stewart, and Paul Whiteley
performance converts more directly into dissatisfaction with the regime and
with democracy itself. The second effect works in the opposite direction. Where
disproportionality is high (low), the effects of government performance on
democracy satisfaction are greater (smaller). We infer here that this reflects the
tendency for citizens in highly disproportional systems to attribute poor (good)
performance to the unfairness of the electoral system, which in turn translates
into greater dissatisfaction (satisfaction) with the existing democratic system.
In any event, these twin effects offer a further caution to would-be electoral
reformers bent on removing the injustices of first-past-the-post.
3 Belgium 2.5
Britain
2
mean of demsat
mean of demsat
2
1.5
1
1
.5
0 0
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
4 Denmark 3 Germany
3
mean of demsat
mean of demsat
1
1
0 0
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
France 3 Ireland
2.5
2
mean of demsat
mean of demsat
1.5
1
1
.5
0 0
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
1975
1976
1977
1978
1977
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
176
Chile
mean of demsat
Brazil
mean of demsat mean of demsat
0
1
2
3
0
1
2
3
0
.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
Albania
Canada
Belgium
Bulgaria
Australia
Denmark
1975 1975
1976 1976 1975
1977 1977 1976
1978 1978 1977
Italy
Spain
Czech Republic
1980 1980 1979
Greece
1981 1980
1981 1981
1982 1982
1983 1982
1983 1983
1984 1984
in the chapter
1985 1984
1985 1985
1986 1986 1986
1987 1987 1987
1988 1988 1988
1989 1989 1989
1990 1990 1990
1991 1991 1991
1992 1992 1992
0.3
2.7
3.3
5.7
3.6
1.1
1.6
3.9
4.2
1993 1993 1993
1994 1994 1994
1995 1995 1995
1996 1996 1996
1997 1997 1997
1998 1998 1998
1999 1999 1999
Disproportionality
2000 2000 2000
2001 2001 2001
2002 2002 2002
2003 2003 2003
2004 2004 2004
2005 2005 2005
2006 2006 2006
2007 2007 2007
0.09
0.32
0.15
1.00
0.70
0.49
0.04
0.32
0.53
0
1
2
3
0
1
2
3
Clarity of
1975
1976 1975
responsibility
1977 1976
1978 1977
1979 1978
1980 1979
1981 1980
Portugal
1982 1981
1983
(0)
1982
1984
Netherlands
1983
1985 1984
1986 1985
1987 1986
1988 1987
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
1989 1988
1990
1991 1989
1992 1990
1993 1991
1994 1992
1993
Plurality(1) / not
1995
1996 1994
1997 1995
1998 1996
1999 1997
2000 1998
2001 1999
2002 2000
2003 2001
2004 2002
2005 2003
2006 2004
0
1
1
0
1
1
0
0
1
2007 2005
2006
2007
New democracy
Output-oriented Legitimacy
177
David Sanders, Harold Clarke, Marianne Stewart, and Paul Whiteley
Notes
1. The index is the mean, constructed by scoring the response categories as very
satisfied = 4, fairly satisfied = 3, a little dissatisfied = 2, and very dissatisfied = 1.
2. Appendix A.9.1 reports country-by-country variations in democracy satisfaction
for these nine countries. Three broad patterns are evident: trendless fluctuation
(Belgium, France, Netherlands, Luxembourg); slight over-time increase (Italy, Ire-
land, Denmark, Britain); and steep decline (Germany, where, after unification, the
lower levels of satisfaction in the east produced an overall national decline). For
similar evidence, see Norris (2011).
3. One other individual-level variable, not considered here, that potentially could
affect democracy satisfaction is whether or not the individual voted for (one of)
the winning party(ies) in the previous election (e.g. Anderson et al. 2005). We
suspect that our government performance assessments variable captures much of
this effect and we accordingly exclude it from our analysis.
4. Among the countries analysed here, we define the following countries as new
democracies: Albania, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Czech Republic, Hungary, Philip-
pines, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Slovenia.
178
Output-oriented Legitimacy
179
David Sanders, Harold Clarke, Marianne Stewart, and Paul Whiteley
180
10
10.1 Introduction
How does the ability of a democracy to adequately represent its citizens influ-
ence public support for the regime? Since the essence of a democracy is to
represent its citizens, there is little doubt that citizens’ evaluations of how
well they are being represented will influence their support for democratic
government. But as we argue below and as our analysis will show, the rela-
tionship between representation and democratic support is more complex
than it seems at first blush because both political representation and demo-
cratic support assume many forms, some more consequential than others. If
citizens feel poorly represented, for example, they are likely to downgrade
their evaluations of the performance of a democratic regime almost as a mat-
ter of course. A more telling question, however, is whether inadequate repre-
sentation leads to a more serious, and presumably long-term, decline in
support for democracy as a form of government. Once citizens begin to ques-
tion whether democracy as an ideal is flawed in one way or another, the legiti-
macy of the regime and the reservoir of support for it during times of stress
begin to erode.
Therefore, in this chapter, we are interested in how political representation
impacts both forms of democratic support—i.e. democratic performance
evaluations, or public satisfaction with how well the current democratic gov-
ernment is working, as well as democratic ideals, or public support for democ-
racy as a form of government.
Just as democratic support assumes many different forms, so does political
representation. Although most representation studies focus on the idea of
substantive representation, or the correspondence between the outcomes
181
Mark Peffley and Robert Rohrschneider
citizens want (e.g. policies, goods, performance) and those produced by the
government, an equally important component of representation is its proce-
dural dimension. Citizens expect governmental procedures and the processes
by which government works to be fair. Procedural fairness is concerned less
with outcomes and more with the processes by which governmental policies
are made and administered (Tyler 1988; Dahl 1989). According to Tyler (1988:
103), irrespective of the policies and the outcomes generated by the govern-
ment, citizens’ evaluations of procedural fairness are based on assessments of
whether authorities are motivated to be fair, are honest, and follow ethical
principles of conduct, whether opportunities for representation were provid-
ed, and whether authorities behaved in a biased fashion. Importantly, judge-
ments of procedural fairness or unfairness have heady consequences for
citizens’ behaviour beyond mere expressions of dissatisfaction with elected
officials. Widespread perceptions of procedural unfairness undermine citi-
zens’ willingness to obey laws and authorities, as well as their fundamental
perceptions of governmental legitimacy (Tyler 1990; Hibbing and Theiss-
Morse 2002).
Thus, unlike the previous chapter by Sanders et al., which focuses more on
the impact of economic outputs on satisfaction with how well the current
democratic government is working or performing, our focus is primarily on
the impact of citizens’ evaluations of procedural fairness on both forms of
democratic support—i.e. democratic satisfaction and democratic ideals, with
a particular interest in the latter. In other words, the primary independent
and dependent variables of theoretical interest in our study are quite different
from those of the Sanders et al. chapter.
The importance of citizens’ evaluations of procedural unfairness has been
demonstrated in a variety of contexts. In the USA, for example, studies find
that one of the most important reasons why the public ‘hates’ the US Con-
gress is that the national legislature is perceived to violate expectations of
procedural fairness (e.g. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 1995, 2002). More gener-
ally, comparative studies find that the procedural fairness of judiciaries and
bureaucracies has an important impact on citizens’ evaluations of parties and
elections (Sanches-Cuenca 2000; Rohrschneider 2005), and even how they
evaluate the EU (Rohrschneider and Loveless 2010). Publics in nations where
so-called arbitrating institutions (i.e. judiciaries and bureaucracies) work well
are much more likely to feel represented by the government than citizens in
countries with poorly working judiciaries and bureaucracies. This finding
comports well with a large volume of research by Tyler and others (e.g. Lind
and Tyler 1988) documenting how citizens’ direct experiences with authori-
ties in their everyday lives—with police, bureaucrats, and legal authorities—
has a major impact on how they view government. Specifically, when people
are treated unfairly by authorities, they quickly generalize those lessons in
182
The Multiple Bases of Democratic Support
formulating their views of the fairness of the broader system (e.g. Peffley and
Hurwitz 2010). For most citizens, encounters with police, bureaucrats, and
legal authorities are as close as they come to an experience with the
government.
Experiences with the authorities of arbitrating or ‘output’ institutions are
doubtless even more important outside the USA, given the limited number of
elections during a typical parliamentary cycle. Thus, it comes as no surprise
that previous research in advanced democracies finds that citizens’ experi-
ences with ‘output’ institutions influence how citizens evaluate ‘input’ insti-
tutions, such that when the former work well, publics also believe that input
institutions—parties and politicians—represent the public interest (Rohrsch-
neider 2002, 2005). In the current study, we focus on more far-reaching con-
sequences of poorly functioning arbitrating institutions for regime
evaluations: does their procedural quality influence citizens’ support for
democratic government—not just their satisfaction with the way democracy
is working, but their more fundamental support for democracy as a form of
government?
We will contrast the influence of the procedural quality of output institu-
tions on regime evaluations with an important alternative explanation for
regime support that emphasizes the degree to which national institutions
are consensual rather than majoritarian (Lijphart 1998; Powell 2000).
Because regimes that rely on consensual institutions, such as federalism and
proportional representation, disperse power broadly to a greater number of
groups—often providing opposition parties with some degree of representa-
tion, consensual democracies are expected to gain the support of a relatively
broad crosssection of the public. By contrast, because majoritarian institu-
tions concentrate political power in the hands of fewer veto players, majori-
tarian democracies are more likely to be supported by those who voted for
the winning majority party than those who sided with a losing party. In
short, democratic support is likely to be more pervasive in regimes character-
ized more by consensual than majoritarian institutions and our study will
compare this institutional explanation of democratic support with one out-
lined previously—the importance of the procedural quality of output
institutions.
We will proceed as follows. We first locate the properties of our two forms
of democratic support—i.e. evaluations of regime performance and regime
ideals—on a ladder of increasing abstraction ranging from concrete evalua-
tions of the performance of a regime to support for the constitutional ideals
of a democracy. Following that, we consider the character of substantive and
procedural representation, which suggests several hypotheses that will be
tested in the empirical analysis, after which we draw more general implica-
tions from the results of our study.
183
Mark Peffley and Robert Rohrschneider
184
The Multiple Bases of Democratic Support
Constitutional
Ideal
Democratic
Reality
statement, ‘Democracy may have problems buts it’s better than any other
form of government,’ on a four-point scale ranging from strongly agree to
strongly disagree.
These questions clearly produce different responses in a way that is theo-
retically meaningful (Figure 10.2). There is virtually a consensus in the 21
nations in our study that democracy is the best form of government. The
mean level of agreement is at or above the ‘agree’ threshold (point 3) in every
country save one (Bulgaria’s mean is 2.9) In percentage terms, more than 90
per cent of respondents in the pooled sample agree that democracies are the
best form of government. The country patterns generally mirror this result,
except for Bulgaria, where a surprisingly large proportion (32 per cent) indi-
cate that another form of government is preferable over a democracy. Other
countries where a significant minority remains sceptical about democracies
are Hungary and Italy (18 per cent), and Slovenia (15 per cent). With the
exception of Italy, these are newer post-communist democracies which sug-
gests that some residual scepticism over democratic ideals exists in these
nations. On the whole, though, these patterns indicate that an overwhelm-
ing proportion of most publics accept democratic ideals.
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Mark Peffley and Robert Rohrschneider
Bulgaria 2001
Italy 2006
Poland 2001
Portugal 2005
Slovenia 2004
Hungary 2002
Romania 2004
Germany 2002
France 2002
Japan 2004
New Zealand 2002
Iceland 2003
Finland 2003
Great Britain 2005
Canada 2004
Spain 2004
Sweden 2002
Switzerland 2003
Ireland 2002
US 2004
Australia 2004
Denmark 2001
0 1 2 3 4
These patterns clearly contrast with the more negative evaluations of the
current performance of democracies. Here the mean evaluations for most
countries range between being ‘not very satisfied’ (point 2) to ‘fairly satisfied’
(point 3). In percentage terms, two-thirds of the pooled sample is at least
fairly satisfied with the democratic process. At the extremes, citizens in Den-
mark are clearly the most satisfied (less than 7 per cent are dissatisfied),
whereas 79 per cent of Bulgarian citizens are dissatisfied. All in all, the two
indicators behave as expected in light of Figure 10.1: the performance of a
regime is evaluated much more critically than the ideal of a democracy.
What explains this variation in support for regime performance and ideals?
Typically, students of regime evaluations use two basic perspectives to explain
democratic support (Table 10.1). One research tradition focuses on the policy
outcomes of the regime, finding that when the economic performance of a
regime is strong, as indicated by higher GDP per capita or lower inflation
rates, publics are more positive about the performance of a nation’s constitu-
tional reality than when economic conditions are weak (e.g. Clarke, Dutt and
Kornberg 1994; Canache, Mondak and Seligson 2001). In representation
terms, this mechanism reflects substantive representation: when a ‘democratic
186
The Multiple Bases of Democratic Support
Macro‐Level Micro‐Level
Substantive
Representation
Macro‐Economic Conditions Evaluations of Economic
Conditions
187
Mark Peffley and Robert Rohrschneider
five times over a four-year interval. They can cast a vote in local, regional,
national, and EU elections, and perhaps in a referendum (e.g. in Switzerland,
or over EU-related matters). But that is usually the extent of citizens’ direct
experience with the procedural mechanisms that constitutes the ‘input’ insti-
tutions of a regime. Contrast this with their exposure to the output institu-
tions of a regime. They no doubt have to contact a local, regional, or even
national bureaucracy or judiciary more frequently than they participate in an
election. Moreover, these contacts often involve highly personal, and there-
fore individually salient, matters (e.g. divorce, disputes with neighbours,
building permits), so that fair or unfair treatment constitutes an important
piece of information about the way that these output institutions function.
This personal experience is no doubt reinforced by impressions from friends,
neighbours, and family members. For example, living in a nation with a cor-
rupt bureaucracy and judiciary, as in Bulgaria and Italy, no doubt contributes
to dissatisfaction with the entire regime (Anderson and Tverdova 2003). In
contrast, residing in a country with well-functioning output institutions
clearly helps boost the regime’s overall evaluations, as in the Netherlands and
Denmark (Rohrschneider 2002, 2005). Our overall argument, then, is that the
procedural quality of output institutions provides an important basis on
which publics evaluate the political regime.
For this reason, Table 10.1 contains two cells for procedural representation,
one located at the individual level and another at the macro level. Prior
research mostly uses a micro-level approach to assess the fairness of institu-
tions (Mishler and Rose 2001; Seligson 2002). This research generates impor-
tant insights but a shortcoming of it is that judgements about a regime’s
fairness and satisfaction with it are likely endogenous—those who are satis-
fied with a regime are also those that believe a regime delivers goods even-
handedly, and vice versa. For this reason, some studies use a macro-level
measure for the fairness of national output institutions, such as the corrup-
tion measures from Transparency International (Anderson and Tverdova
2003) or the World Bank measures of the fairness of bureaucracies and judici-
aries (Rohrschneider and Loveless 2010). To the extent that these indicators
rely on judgements by experts, and aggregate this information by country,
they avoid the endogenous relationship between indicators measured in one
survey at the individual level. To avoid the bias associated with one method
or another, we will rely on both macro and micro assessments of institutional
quality in ways discussed below.
In sum, the perspective of substantive representation predicts that regime
evaluations will improve when economic conditions and economic percep-
tions become more favourable, whereas the procedural perspective hypothe-
sizes that the procedural quality of output institutions influences citizens’
evaluations of a regime’s performance and ideals. Formally, we focus the cen-
188
The Multiple Bases of Democratic Support
tral hypothesis on the procedural dimension because the Sanders et al. chap-
ter examines economic performance factors in detail:
H1: Procedurally fair output institutions increase public evaluations of a regime.
We use the CSES, second wave, to test these hypotheses. We included all
countries of the EU, and democracies from other regions of the world
(Table A.10.1). We excluded nations that are not fully democratic because we
189
Mark Peffley and Robert Rohrschneider
190
The Multiple Bases of Democratic Support
10.6 Results
Table 10.2 presents the results for the macro-level variables. The results une-
quivocally show that the institutional quality variable is the only (!) signifi-
cant predictor of both democratic performance and ideals. Clearly, when
nations have well-functioning output institutions, citizens are much more
likely to give positive performance evaluations.4 Somewhat surprising is the
even stronger impact of institutional quality on democratic ideals—
individuals are more intense in their preference for a democracy over its alter-
natives when output institutions work well, independently of national
affluence. Given the range of the democratic ideals variable for most c ountries
(Figure 10.2), it must be that most of the explained variation is across agree
versus strongly agree response categories rather than the agree versus disagree
Macro variables:
Institutional quality 0.081* 0.067**
(0.040) (0.024)
HDI 1.37 –0.11
(1.77) (1.03)
Parties–executive dimension 0.015 0.036
(0.047) (0.027)
Federalism 0.015 0.030
(0.044) (0.026)
Length of democracy 0.00021 0.00087
(0.0013) (0.00077)
Constant 1.01 3.06**
(1.52) (0.89)
Observations 29,686 28,809
Number of groups 21 21
Note: Entries are unstandardized coefficients estimated using xtmixed in Stata 11.
+, *, ** indicates significance at the p = 0.10, 05, and 01 levels, respectively.
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Mark Peffley and Robert Rohrschneider
Table 10.3. Predicting democratic performance and democratic ideals, including individual-
level controls
Macro variables:
Institutional quality 0.059+ 0.055*
(0.034) (0.024)
HDI 0.64 –0.29
(1.49) (1.06)
Parties–executive dimension 0.016 0.047
(0.039) (0.028)
Federalism 0.049 0.026
(0.037) (0.026)
Length of democracy –0.00046 0.00026
(0.0011) (0.00078)
Individual-level variables:
Political interest 0.030** 0.092**
(0.011) (0.011)
Government performance 0.22** 0.069**
(0.0032) (0.0033)
Female –0.028** –0.042**
(0.0086) (0.0086)
Age 0.000079 0.0034**
(0.00026) (0.00027)
Education 0.017** 0.070**
(0.0027) (0.0027)
Constant 0.71 2.49**
(1.28) (0.90)
Observations 23,793 22,992
Number of groups 21 21
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The Multiple Bases of Democratic Support
Denmark 2001
Canada 2004
Human Rights are Respected (1 = No 4 = Yes)
Poland 2003
3.2
Australia 2004
Germany 2002
US 2004 Finland 2003
3 Great Britain 2005
Japan 2004 Sweden 2002
Hungary 2002 Ireland 2002 New Zealand 200
2.8 Iceland 2003
Spain 2004
France 2002
2.6
Italy 2006
Slovenia 2004
2.4 Poland 2001
Romania 2004
2.2
Bulgaria 2001
0 2 4 6 8
Institutional Quality
Germany 2002
Slovenia 2004 Japan 2004
France 2002
Hungary 2002
3
Ireland 2002
Canada 2004
US 2004
Spain 2004
2.5
Switzerland 2003
Great Britain 2005
Australia 2004
Finland 2003
Iceland 2003
New Zealand 200
Sweden 2002
2 Denmark 2001
0 2 4 6 8
Institutional Quality (Low to High)
Figure 10.3 a–c. Institutional quality and procedural evaluations of national systems
(mean scores on y-axis)
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Mark Peffley and Robert Rohrschneider
1
Party Represents Citizens (0 No 1 Yes)
Switzerland 2003
Australia
Denmark2004
2001
.8 New Zealand 200
Ireland 2002
Sweden 2002
Spain 2004 Great Britain 2005
Hungary 2002 US 2004 Canada 2004
Finland 2003
.6 Iceland 2003
Japan 2004 Germany 2002
France 2002
Bulgaria 2001
Romania 2004
Italy 2006
.4
Poland 2001
Slovenia 2004
.2
0 2 4 6 8
Institutional Quality (Low to High)
this is true, as our argument stipulates, then the inclusion of measures that
clearly tap individual-level perceptions of the procedural quality of a political
regime should reduce the impact of the macro-level quality indicator. As
revealed in the graphs of Figure 10.3, there is a fairly strong relationship at
the aggregate level between institutional quality, on the one hand, and the
average country scores for measures of the degree to which the government
is perceived to engage in corruption and respect human rights and how well
the parties represent one’s views (see the Appendix A.10.1 for the survey
measures). The first graph plots the quality of national institutions on the
x-axis and the mean country scores on government corruption perceptions
on the y-axis. Including this variable in the multilevel model should there-
fore absorb some of the impact of the institutional quality indicator on dem-
ocratic evaluations. Similarly, when publics believe that human rights are
respected, then this too should capture part of the procedural quality of out-
put institutions. Therefore, the inclusion of individuals’ evaluations of the
state of human rights should also lower the impact of the institutional qual-
ity variable. Finally, we also included citizens’ perceptions of whether parties
represent them in the political process. This captures clearly both procedural
and substantive aspects of representation and this indicator should also con-
tribute to a reduction of the relevance of the institutional quality indicator.
Consistent with this expectation, our next model (Table 10.4) shows that
the institutional quality indicator is now insignificant. This indicates that
its influence is mediated by individual-level evaluations of regime
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The Multiple Bases of Democratic Support
Table 10.4. Predicting democratic performance and democratic ideals, including individual-
level controls and individual-level evaluations of procedural fairness
Macro variables:
Institutional quality 0.0082 0.028
(0.030) (0.025)
HDI 0.81 –0.16
(1.30) (1.10)
Parties–executive dimension 0.0069 0.45
(0.034) (0.029)
Federalism 0.039 0.014
(0.032) (0.027)
length of democracy –0.00030 0.00037
(0.00096) (0.00081)
Individual-level variables:
Political interest –0.0082 0.059**
(0.011) (0.011)
Government performance 0.17** 0.041**
(0.0034) (0.0035)
Female 0.0031 –0.027**
(0.0087) (0.0089)
Age –0.00087** 0.0028**
(0.00027) (0.00028)
Education 0.00070 0.060**
(0.0027) (0.0028)
Party representation 0.14** 0.13**
(0.010) (0.010)
Respects freedoms and rights 0.23** 0.15**
(0.0063) (0.0065)
Perceived corruption –0.12** –0.037**
(0.0061) (0.0063)
Constant 0.72 2.28*
(1.11) (0.94)
Observations 21,183 20,697
Number of groups 21 21
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Mark Peffley and Robert Rohrschneider
order to address this argument, we conducted several analyses with the three
procedural evaluations as the dependent variable. That is, we estimated
three multilevel models which include the predictors shown in Table 10.4
(minus government performance),7 with the dependent variable being pop-
ular evaluations of human rights, corruption, and representation. The goal
is to examine whether institutional quality is indeed the main reason for
these evaluations, or whether its influence is superseded by the two Lijphart
indicators or nations’ socio-economic affluence (Table 10.5).
The empirical patterns are surprisingly clear: a nation’s institutional quality
significantly shapes mass evaluations of regime procedures. Higher quality
increases beliefs that human rights are respected in a country, perceptions of
corruption are lower, and the representation process receives more positive
evaluations than in countries that have lower governance scores. Evidently, a
well-functioning set of governance institutions goes a long way toward bring-
ing about a belief that national democratic procedures of a nation are in
order. What is remarkable about these results is that they emerge even though
we control for a country’s socio-economic affluence, which never reaches
statistical significance. In addition, these results also control for the two
Macro variables:
Institutional quality 0.11** –0.19** 0.26**
(0.027) (0.046) (0.092)
HDI 0.49 1.40 –3.33
(1.19) (2.03) (4.06)
Federalism 0.084** 0.13** –0.013
(0.029) (0.050) (0.10)
Parties–executive dimension –0.00024 –0.082 0.022
(0.031) (0.053) (0.11)
Length of democracy –0.00056 –0.0015 0.00021
(0.00088) (0.0015) 0.26**
Individual-level variables:
Political interest 0.025* –0.024* 0.96**
(0.011) (0.012) (0.040)
Female –0.058** 0.11** –0.10**
(0.0083) (0.0087) (0.027)
Age 0.00093** –0.0024** 0.014**
(0.00025) (0.00026) (0.00083)
Education 0.050** –0.035** 0.078**
(0.0026) (0.0027) (0.0085)
Constant 1.66 2.64 1.42
(1.02) (1.74) (3.48)
Observations 29,754 28,570 28,081
Number of groups 21 21 21
Note: Models 1 and 2 were estimated using xtmixed in Stata 11.0; Model 3 is estimated using xtlogit.
196
The Multiple Bases of Democratic Support
10.7 Conclusions
All in all, these analyses clearly show that the procedural quality of national
institutions influences the way that citizens evaluate the performance of a
regime. More importantly, however, is the result that the quality of output
institutions also affects the way that individuals judge democratic ideals. It is
perhaps not surprising that individuals residing in nations where corruption
is rampant among bureaucrats and the judiciary (to name but one example)
also conclude that other parts of a regime—parties, politicians, and
governments—are not performing well. For these reasons, it is regrettable
that few studies link the procedural integrity of output institutions to public
evaluations of democratic institutions. This is all the more regrettable as the
quality of these output institutions also affects the way that democratic ideals
are viewed. Perhaps the most important, and distressing, finding is that poor-
ly functioning output institutions are associated with a strong tendency for
citizens to question whether a democracy is preferable to other forms of
government—perhaps the most enduring and consequential evaluation of
democracy in Figure 10.1. This fact alone should spawn further studies of the
connection between the procedural quality of output institutions and public
evaluations of democratic ideals.
Democratic satisfaction: ‘On the whole, are you very satisfied, fairly satisfied,
not very satisfied, or not at all satisfied with the way democracy works in
(country)?’ Response categories range from not satisfied at all (1) to very
satisfied (4).
Democratic ideals: ‘Democracy may have problems buts it’s better than any
other form of government’, on a four-point scale ranging from strongly agree
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Mark Peffley and Robert Rohrschneider
to strongly disagree. Response categories are from strongly agree (1) to strong-
ly disagree (4). We reversed the polarity.
Evaluations of human rights: ‘How much respect is there for individual free-
dom and human rights nowadays in (country)? Do you feel there is a lot of
respect for individual freedom, some respect, not much respect, or no respect
at all?’
Representation through parties: ‘Would you say that any of the parties in (coun-
try) represents your views reasonably well?’
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The Multiple Bases of Democratic Support
Macro variables:
Institutional quality 41242 4.21539 2.226138 –.56 6.72
Human Dimension Index 41242 .92551 0.0451706 .802 .963
Federalism (Lijphart) 38441 .0710335 1.118332 –1.611294
2.451343
Executive–parties dimension (Lijphart) 38441 .066794 1.038367 –2.372764
1.690315
Individual-level variables:
Age 40948 47.81169 17.16458 17 102
Education 40844 5.126604 1.723941 1 8
Political interest 40825 .216632 0.4119547 0 1
Government performance 31187 4.610415 1.451503 2 8
Human rights respected 38197 2.825719 0.7879873 1 4
Corruption 38157 2.808056 0.9041523 1 4
Representation 30252 1.180881 0.7748019 0 2
Notes
1. See Rohrschneider and Schmitt-Beck (2002) for a detailed discussion of each of the
six levels of democratic evaluations.
2. A more extensive set of control variables, including class and left–right perceptions,
does not substantially change the results but has the undesirable consequence of
reducing the number of cases at both the individual level and, especially regretta-
ble, the countries that we can include in our analyses.
3. We also imputed missing data for our multilevel data using Stata 11’s Multiple
Imputation method for clustered data. The results for the multiply imputed data,
however, are virtually identical to those presented here, but are available from the
authors upon request.
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Mark Peffley and Robert Rohrschneider
200
11
Globalization, Representation,
and Attitudes towards Democracy
Kees Aarts, Jacques Thomassen, and Carolien van Ham
11.1 Introduction
201
Kees Aarts, Jacques Thomassen, and Carolien van Ham
and at the meso level of political parties and media that mediate between citi-
zens and system, transmitting citizens’ preferences as well as shaping them.
At the micro level of individual citizens, the two most important explana-
tions for declining political support are the modernization thesis on the one
hand and the globalization thesis on the other hand. The modernization the-
sis was first introduced by Inglehart (1971, 1977), and subsequently elaborated
and empirically tested by Dalton (2004) and Norris (2011). In his 2004 study
Dalton rephrases this thesis as the positive effects thesis, and contrasts it to the
negative effects thesis. Both hypotheses refer to the effects of the socio-economic
(and concomitant cultural) transformation of advanced industrial societies.
According to the positive effects thesis the second half of the twentieth cen-
tury was a period of rising affluence, expanding education, and improving
social opportunities for most citizens. This social modernization gradually
transformed the relationship between citizens and the state. Greater political
skills and resources—that is, higher levels of cognitive mobilization—led the
contemporary electorate towards elite-challenging forms of political action,
which places them in conflict with politicians and government officials.
These better-educated citizens are inclined to question democratic politics as
it is currently practised not because they do not endorse strong democratic
ideals but because they demand a greater role in the political process. There-
fore, the positive effects thesis claims:
The greatest loss in support should be located among those who are at the upper
end of the economic order: the better educated, the more skilled, and those with
higher incomes. (Dalton 2004: 86)
The negative effects thesis argues, however, that the development of advanced
industrial societies created new social and economic problems that have
eroded the public support of the citizenry. Social groups on the periphery of
the economy, such as the less educated and the unemployed, are becoming
increasingly marginalized by the labour structure of advanced industrial soci-
eties. Moreover, it is these marginalized citizens that are most strongly affect-
ed by processes of globalization, as we will further elaborate below (Dalton
2004; Kriesi et al. 2008; Bovens and Wille 2009). Hence, the negative effects
hypothesis posits that:
The greatest loss in support should be located among those who are at the margins
of the economic order: the less educated, the less skilled, and those with lower
incomes. In contrast, upper-status groups also might have become more sceptical
about government, but not to the same degree as lower-status groups. (Dalton
2004: 85)
Dalton’s own research and Norris’s (2011) more recent findings leave little
doubt about the empirical validity of these two alternative hypotheses. Both
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Globalization, Representation, and Attitudes towards Democracy
authors find evidence for the ‘positive effects thesis’ that locates declining
legitimacy among the wealthier, higher educated ‘critical citizens’. Dalton
(2004) moreover shows that over time the relationship between education
and political trust has gradually changed. In most of the countries repre-
sented in Dalton’s study this relationship has weakened whereas in some
countries (the USA and Germany) it has even reversed. In these countries the
higher educated citizens are now less trustful than lower-educated citizens.
The ‘losers’ of globalization are people whose life chances were traditionally pro-
tected by national boundaries. They perceive the weakening of these boundaries
as a threat to their social status and their social security. (Kriesi et al. 2008: 5)
The likely winners of globalization, in contrast, are those ‘who benefit from
the new opportunities resulting from globalization, and whose life chances
are enhanced’ (Kriesi et al. 2008: 5). In terms of social groups, ‘winners’
include entrepreneurs and qualified employees in sectors open to interna-
tional competition, as well as cosmopolitan citizens, while ‘losers’ include
entrepreneurs and qualified employees in traditionally protected sectors, all
unqualified employees, and citizens who strongly identify themselves with
their national community (Kriesi et al. 2008: 8).
According to Kriesi et al., the antagonism between winners and losers of
globalization is leading to a new structural conflict between integration and
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Kees Aarts, Jacques Thomassen, and Carolien van Ham
Social-economic dimension
Demarcation A B
Integration C D
204
Globalization, Representation, and Attitudes towards Democracy
The poorer strata everywhere are more liberal or leftist on economic issues; they
favour more welfare state measures, higher wages, graduated income taxes, sup-
port of tradeunions, and so forth. But when liberalism is defined in noneconomic
terms—as support of civil liberties, internationalism, etc.—the correlation is
reversed. The more well-to-do are more liberal, the poorer are more intolerant.
(Lipset 1966: 101–2)
And:
Since the political elites tend to belong to the well-to-do and in particular to
the better educated, the logical consequence is a problem of political repre-
sentation among the parties on the left where political elites combine a leftist
attitude on social-economic issues with a libertarian attitude on immaterial
issues whereas their voters—assuming they vote according to social-economic
issues—combine a leftist attitude on social-economic issues with an authori-
tarian or conservative stand on immaterial issues. As a consequence political
elites will hardly be representative of their rank and file on immaterial issues:
The gradual realization that extremist and intolerant movements in modern soci-
ety are more likely to be based on the lower classes than on the middle and upper
classes has posed a tragic dilemma for those intellectuals of the democratic left
who once believed the proletariat necessarily to be a force for liberty, racial equal-
ity, and social progress. (Lipset 1966: 97)
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Kees Aarts, Jacques Thomassen, and Carolien van Ham
The cultural dimension introduced by Kriesi et al. is based on the same liber-
tarian–authoritarian dimension Lipset referred to, and his argument still
applies.1 If this is correct, most working class voters will be in quadrant A
where—at least in many countries, and at least until relatively recently—no
political parties are, whereas the political parties and political elites on the
left are in quadrant C.2 Moreover, people in quadrant A might presently have
even better reasons to feel poorly represented than at the time when Lipset
made his observations, for two reasons. First, in the 1990s most of the tradi-
tional social-democratic parties have moved towards a more liberal position
on the social-economic dimension, leaving their traditional electorate
behind. Second, and more importantly, over the last decade the cultural
dimension has become more salient (Pellikaan, De Lange and Van der Meer
2007; Aarts and Thomassen 2008b). Therefore, among voters on the demarca-
tion side of the cultural dimension, feelings of not being well represented can
only be expected to increase.3 As a consequence they will have little reason to
be satisfied with the functioning of democracy. Of course, it is precisely for
this reason that populist parties from the left (positioning themselves in
quadrant A) and in particular from the right (positioning themselves in quad-
rant B) are extremely successful in most Western European countries and in
particular in consensus democracies with their proportional electoral system
where they can easily get access to parliament. This is in line with the general
expectation that consensus democracies mainly because of their proportional
electoral system and their multiparty system are more responsive to the
(changing) needs of the citizens. Thus one might argue that in those coun-
tries voters no longer have a reason to feel unrepresented as there are now
parties available to represent them on both dimensions, or at least on the
increasingly important cultural dimension.
Therefore, it is our expectation that in line with the negative effects hypoth-
esis those who are at the margins of the economic order: the less educated, the less
skilled, and those with lower incomes feel gradually less well represented by any
of the political parties and therefore are increasingly dissatisfied with the
functioning of democracy. We also expect that this effect will be smaller in
consensus democracies than in majoritarian democracies.4 The well-educated
group of the population that was responsible for the cultural revolution of
the second part of the twentieth century is in a totally different position.
Inglehart’s (1977) argument that one of the reasons why well-educated
youngsters rebelled against the political establishment of those days was that
the established parties did not represent them on post-material issues like the
protection of the environment, women’s rights, etc. hardly applies anymore.
They often found close allies in the established parties of the left and, in due
course, spawned a new set of parties—the New Left and Green parties. Mainly
located at the borderline between quadrants C and D, these well-educated,
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Globalization, Representation, and Attitudes towards Democracy
11.4 Hypotheses
As outlined above, we expect to find empirical support for the negative effects
hypothesis rather than the positive effects hypothesis and more so in majori-
tarian than in consensus democracies. Hence, our first two hypotheses are:
H1: Those who are at the margins of the economic order—the less educated, the
less skilled, and those with lower incomes—will have more negative attitudes
towards democracy than those that are at the upper end of the economic order:
the better educated, the more skilled, and those with higher incomes.
H2: This difference will be larger in majoritarian than in consensus democracies.
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Kees Aarts, Jacques Thomassen, and Carolien van Ham
Graph A: Graph B:
modernization globalization
Political support
Political support
High SES
Low SES
Low SES
High SES
Time Time
While in the positive effects hypothesis the causal mechanism leading well-
off citizens to be more critical of politics is rather straightforward, in the nega-
tive effects hypothesis the causal mechanism connecting globalization
processes to attitudes towards democracy is less obvious and requires further
specification. In our discussion above we have proposed one way in which
globalization may be connected to attitudes towards democracy, by arguing
that citizens with different socio-economic status are differentially affected by
globalization, which subsequently alters their issue positions. The degree to
which such positions are catered for by political parties subsequently affects
the degree to which these citizens feel represented by parties and are satisfied
with democracy. This causal mechanism is drawn in Figure 11.2 below.
Note that the link between issue positions and feeling represented is once
again mediated by both the party system and the electoral system (not shown
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Globalization, Representation, and Attitudes towards Democracy
in Figure 11.2), as the availability of parties that match one’s positions as well
as the chances of such a party entering parliament are likely to affect feelings
of representation.6 In our empirical analyses, however, we will only test the
links between socio-economic position and issue positions, as well as issue
positions and feelings of representation and satisfaction with democracy; as
a first step to elaborate the causal mechanism proposed. Since the globaliza-
tion thesis refers to over-time change, hypotheses 4 and 5 are formulated
dynamically as well, as follows:
H4: Those who are at the margins of the economic order (i.e. the less educated, the
less skilled, and those with lower incomes) are increasingly found in quadrant A
of the socio-economic and cultural issue dimensions.
H5: Those who are in quadrant A of the socio-economic and cultural issue dimen-
sions feel increasingly less represented by political parties and are less satisfied
with democracy.
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Kees Aarts, Jacques Thomassen, and Carolien van Ham
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Globalization, Representation, and Attitudes towards Democracy
any of the political parties in the country represents the respondent’s views
reasonably well. The response to this question can be yes or no. The second
indicator is satisfaction with democracy. This variable has been measured
directly in CSES Module 2, with responses on a 1–4 scale running from ‘very
satisfied’ to ‘not at all satisfied’.
Using the indicators for social class and for status implies that not all elec-
tion studies included in the CSES Module 2 can be analysed, leaving us with
28 elections in the analysis (see Table A.11.3 in Appendix A.11.1). With the
CSES study, the main propositions to be tested are hypotheses 1 and 2, i.e.
those who are at the margins of the economic order—the less educated, the
less skilled, and those with lower incomes—feel relatively poorly represented
by any of the political parties and are, perhaps therefore, relatively dissatis-
fied with the functioning of democracy. Moreover, we expect this gap to be
larger in majoritarian democracies than in consensus democracies.
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Kees Aarts, Jacques Thomassen, and Carolien van Ham
Throughout 1971–2010, education has been measured with several scales (and
the school systems in the Netherlands have changed as well). It is possible
though to use a consistent rough distinction between those respondents who
have completed only primary and/or basic secondary school (usually circa four
more years of school after primary school), and those who obtained a diploma
from a more advanced type of school or university.13 Social class self-image has
been asked consistently throughout the 1971–2010 period, with a five-point
scale. In the analyses, a trichotomy has been applied between those respond-
ents considering themselves as (upper) working class, middle class, and upper-
middle or upper class. Attitudes towards democracy are measured with two
indicators: satisfaction with democracy and external efficacy. External efficacy
approximates the CSES item ‘feelings of being represented’ best, and is con-
structed as an index based on three survey items (see Appendix A.11.1). These
variables have been included in every election study since 1971. Satisfaction
with democracy has been asked in the Dutch studies only since 1998, and there-
fore only a relatively short time series is available for this key indicator.
In addition to socio-economic position and attitudes towards democracy,
in order to test hypotheses 4 and 5, we also need issue positions. We have
picked two political issues that measure respondents’ positions on the socio-
economic and cultural dimensions outlined in the theoretical section, i.e. the
desirability of larger or smaller income differences, and the desired extent of
European integration. Respondents have been asked to place themselves on
these issues, which have together been included in the DPES from 1994
onwards. Based on these issue positions, we can position respondents in one
of the four quadrants outlined in Table 11.1. Using the DPES data, we will test
hypotheses 4 and 5, i.e. those with lower socio-economic status are increas-
ingly found in quadrant A of the socio-economic and cultural issue dimen-
sions, and those in quadrant A of the socio-economic and cultural issue
dimensions, feel increasingly less represented by political parties and are less
satisfied with democracy.
11.6 Results
11.6.1 Cross-sectional Comparative Analysis: CSES
In the cross-sectional comparative analyses we test hypotheses 1 and 2, focus-
ing on the effects of socio-economic status on feelings of being represented
and satisfaction with democracy.
We first look at the feeling of being represented. In Table 11.2 the percent-
age differences are presented between contrast groups on the indicators of
social class and education/income (see above and Appendix A.11.1). In order
to be able to test hypothesis 2, consensus and majoritarian democracies are
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Globalization, Representation, and Attitudes towards Democracy
Notes: Bivariate logit regression results. P-values: + 0.1, * 0.05, ** 0.01, *** 0.001.
presented separately. If our indicators are valid and it is true that persons in
disadvantaged socio-economic positions also feel less well represented, we
expect to find positive percentage differences in Table 11.2.
A large majority of the percentage differences is indeed positive, as expect-
ed.14 This means that the better-off social classes and those with higher scores
on the income-education indicator do feel represented by a political party
more often than persons on the other side of these social divides. The con-
trast is especially clear in Canada and Germany. In other countries, however,
the differences are very small or negligibly close to zero. These include
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Kees Aarts, Jacques Thomassen, and Carolien van Ham
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Globalization, Representation, and Attitudes towards Democracy
Notes: Bivariate logit regression results. P-values: + 0.1, * 0.05, ** 0.01, *** 0.001.
215
216
80 80 80
60 60 60
40 40 40
20 20 20
0 0 0
1973
1978
1983
1988
1993
1998
2003
2008
1973
1978
1983
1988
1993
1998
2003
2008
1973
1978
1983
1988
1993
1998
2003
2008
Low educated Medium educated Low educated Medium educated Low educated Medium educated
High educated High educated High educated
80 80 80
60 70 60
40 60 40
20 50 20
0 40 0
1973
1978
1983
1988
1993
1998
2003
2008
1973
1978
1983
1988
1993
1998
2003
2008
1973
1978
1983
1988
1993
1998
2003
2008
Low educated Medium educated Low educated Medium educated Low educated Medium educated
High educated High educated High educated
60 60 60
40 40 40
20 20 20
0 0 0
1973
1978
1983
1988
1993
1998
2003
2008
1973
1978
1983
1988
1993
1998
2003
2008
1973
1978
1983
1988
1993
1998
2003
2008
Low educated Medium educated Low educated Medium educated Low educated Medium educated
High educated High educated High educated
Figure 11.3. Trends in satisfaction with democracy by education in nine European democracies
Globalization, Representation, and Attitudes towards Democracy
217
Kees Aarts, Jacques Thomassen, and Carolien van Ham
90
80
70
60
percentage
50
40
30
20
10
0
1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010
year
Source: Dutch National Election Studies, weighted data
80
70
60
percentage
50
40
30
20
10
0
1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010
year
Source: Dutch National Election Studies, weighted data
218
Globalization, Representation, and Attitudes towards Democracy
80
60
percentage
40
20
0
1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
year
80
60
percentage
40
20
0
1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
year
219
Kees Aarts, Jacques Thomassen, and Carolien van Ham
80
60
percentage
40
20
0
1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
year
80
60
percentage
40
20
0
1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
year
220
Globalization, Representation, and Attitudes towards Democracy
that politics is responsive to citizens like oneself) and satisfaction with democ-
racy do not show clear upward or downward trends in the time intervals for
which data are available. It is also clear that the lower- and medium-educated
respondents have a consistently lower sense of external efficacy than the
higher-educated respondents. While this does demonstrate that the negative
effects hypothesis holds in the Netherlands when considering static differ-
ences between social groups, confirming hypothesis 1 for this specific coun-
try, it also indicates that the gap between the socio-economic advantaged and
disadvantaged does not seem to be widening, disconfirming hypothesis 2 in
the case of the Netherlands. Rather, Figure 11.6 seems to show class differ-
ences in attitudes towards democracy that appear to be rather stable over
time.18 The only period in which the gap between socio-economic groups
briefly narrows is around the 2002 election (in which Pim Fortuyn’s LPF par-
ticipated with much success). The time series for satisfaction with democracy
is shorter than that for the other variables in Figure 11.6, as the question was
only included in the DPES from 1998 onwards. It is still remarkable that in
1998 and 2002, the first two time points for this variable, the difference
between lower/medium-educated and higher-educated citizens is barely
noticeable. Only since 2003, differences in satisfaction with democracy are
observed for people with different educational levels, with higher-educated
people being relatively more often satisfied.
Similar patterns as observed in Figure 11.6 appear when we consider the
relationship between attitudes towards democracy and social class self-image.
Figure 11.7 shows the trends for three levels of social class: upper (middle),
middle, and (upper) working class. Almost without exception, people with a
higher self-image of their social class have a higher sense of external efficacy.
Again, social class appears to have a much weaker impact on people’s satisfac-
tion with democracy, at least until 2003. After 2003, social class is associated
with different levels of satisfaction with democracy as well, with the higher
classes being the most satisfied. Taken together, Figures 11.4–11.7 have made
it clear that in the case of the Netherlands, which serves here as a pars pro toto,
ever fewer citizens have a lower or medium level of education and ever fewer
citizens consider themselves as working class. At the same time, education
and social class are clearly associated with attitudes towards democracy (exter-
nal efficacy and satisfaction with democracy), with higher education and
class leading to higher efficacy and higher satisfaction with democracy.19
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Kees Aarts, Jacques Thomassen, and Carolien van Ham
well as the relation between these issue positions and attitudes towards
democracy. The goal of this analysis is to test the causal mechanism by which
globalization might affect the relation between socio-economic status and
attitudes towards democracy, as outlined in Figure 11.2. We focus first on the
relationships between socio-economic status (education and social class) and
these issue positions over the 1994–2010 period, testing hypothesis 4, and
then consider the relation between issue positions and attitudes towards
democracy, testing hypothesis 5.
Table 11.4 shows the results for level of education. As a reading example,
consider the penultimate column in Table 11.4. This column shows the pro-
portion of respondents with issue positions in quadrant A as outlined in
Table 11.1, i.e. those respondents who were in favour of demarcation on
both the socio-economic and cultural dimensions. These issue positions are
measured here as being both in favour of smaller income differences and less
European integration. Of respondents with a lower–medium education in
1994, 13 per cent placed themselves in this quadrant. By 2010, this propor-
tion had increased to 39 per cent (and it was even higher in 2006). Among
the respondents with higher education, the percentage of respondents plac-
ing themselves in quadrant A also increased, but these percentages are much
lower (11 to 23 per cent respectively), indicating a clear effect of education
on these issue positions. Several other aspects of the results in Table 11.4 are
worth noting. First, consider the relative sizes of the different groups of
respondents over the five election years. The first column of Table 11.4 shows
the group of respondents that take middle or don’t know positions on one or
both issues. This group appears to have shrunk, from 55.5 per cent in 1994
to 35.2 per cent in 2006, and then went up again somewhat in 2010. The
underlying reason for this trend is that fewer respondents ended up in the
middle or the ‘don’t know’ category of the European unification issue. Euro-
pean unification provoked more people to take a for- or against-position in
these years. In practice, this development favoured the camp against further
integration. Again, the largest change can be found in quadrant A. Table 11.4
shows that the group of persons who want less integration and also smaller
income differences grew from 13.0 per cent in 1994, to 39.0 per cent in 2006,
and then decreased again to 29.8 per cent in 2010.20 Citizens chose sides on
European unification, and those who opposed larger income differences also
tended to oppose further European integration. The other three groups show
some changes in relative size, but much less.
A similar analysis has been conducted for social class self-image and the
issue typology, and the results are shown in Table 11.5. The table can be read
in the same way as Table 11.4. Again, the largest change appears to have
occurred in the group of respondents in quadrant A, i.e. those who support
smaller income differences and less European integration: the higher one’s
222
Globalization, Representation, and Attitudes towards Democracy
subjective class, the smaller this group is and vice versa. Among respondents
who identify themselves as working class the proportion supporting issue
positions in this quadrant in 1994 is 15 per cent and increases over time to
reach 41 per cent in 2010. Tables 11.4 and 11.5 thus show that the socio-
economic position of citizens matters for how they think about political
issues, confirming hypothesis 4. How are people’s positions on these issues
related to attitudes towards democracy?
Table 11.6 reports the percentages of respondents with a high level of
external efficacy and satisfaction with democracy among the various
groups defined on the basis of their position on the issues of income differ-
ences and European integration. For example, of the persons in quadrant
A, i.e. those who preferred smaller income differences and less European
integration in 1994, 37.7 per cent had a high score on the index of external
efficacy. This compares with 59.8 per cent of persons with high external
efficacy among those who prefer smaller income differences and more
integration.
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Kees Aarts, Jacques Thomassen, and Carolien van Ham
Table 11.5. Social class self-image, and position on income differences and European
integration
The patterns in Table 11.6 are clear. Citizens who think that European inte-
gration has already gone too far tend to feel less well represented, as measured
by external efficacy, than the persons belonging to the other groups (with a
single exception in 2002). This is regardless of whether they favour larger or
smaller income differences. As for satisfaction with democracy, in 1998 it
appears to be still uniformly high among all groups (with a low of 75.5 per
cent among those who want smaller differences and less integration). In the
more recent years (2002–10), however, it appears that satisfaction with
democracy is markedly lower among persons who oppose further European
integration. With some delay, satisfaction with democracy thus shows the
same pattern as external efficacy. External efficacy and satisfaction with
224
Globalization, Representation, and Attitudes towards Democracy
democracy are highest among those who want further integration. While this
partly confirms hypothesis 5, i.e. those with issue positions in quadrant A
have less positive attitudes towards democracy, the relationship is weakened
by the fact that citizens with issue positions in quadrant B share these
attitudes.
So far we have been able to reconstruct in part the process that leads to
lower satisfaction with democracy. It involves socio-economic changes,
which affect issue positions on both socio-economic and cultural dimen-
sions, which subsequently affect attitudes towards democracy. It appears to
be especially the position on the cultural dimension, exemplified here by
European integration, that is related to attitudes towards democracy.
11.7 Conclusion
This chapter aimed at assessing the validity of the claim that a new structural
conflict dimension in the politics of industrialized democracies is gradually
affecting the legitimacy of democracy among specific social-economic groups
in these democracies. We have analysed this claim via three sets of analyses:
cross-nationally using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, cross-
nationally and longitudinally using the Eurobarometer, and longitudinally
using the Dutch parliamentary election studies.
In the cross-national analysis based on CSES data we have assessed to
what extent disadvantaged socio-economic positions go together with the
feeling that one is not represented by any political party, and with dissatis-
faction with democracy. With some notable exceptions, a large majority of
225
Kees Aarts, Jacques Thomassen, and Carolien van Ham
the percentage differences for the feeling of being represented in Table 11.2
point in the expected direction, confirming the negative effects hypothesis.
Hence, in the majority of democracies in our sample, the positive effects
hypothesis is refuted. Instead, it is those citizens on the margin of the eco-
nomic order that feel less well represented and are less satisfied with democ-
racy. However, it must be noted that the differences are generally not very
large, indicating that socio-economic status is most likely only one of mul-
tiple factors explaining attitudes towards democracy. Moreover, we did not
find evidence for a larger gap between citizens of different socio-economic
backgrounds in majoritarian democracies than in consensus democracies.
Furthermore, in the longitudinal analysis based on Eurobarometer data, we
have shown that the gap between different social groups has not increased,
as the globalization argument proposes (nor has it decreased, as the mod-
ernization thesis posits). Rather, class differences in attitudes towards
democracy appear to follow similar fluctuations over time, and the gap
between groups appears to fluctuate over time, rather than consistently
increase or decrease.
In the analysis based on DPES data from the Netherlands we attempted to
unpack the causal mechanism connecting globalization processes to attitudes
towards democracy. We found that in the case of the Netherlands the level of
education has clearly risen and self-identification as working class has become
ever more rare. Higher education and social class are also associated with
higher external efficacy, and—after 2002—also with satisfaction with democ-
racy. This is in line with the negative effects hypothesis. The case of the Neth-
erlands thus bears out the central expectations formulated in the first section
of the chapter: those who are at the margins of the economic order: the less
educated, the less skilled, and those with lower incomes have lower external
efficacy and are relatively dissatisfied with the functioning of democracy. As
regards the causal mechanism implied by the negative effects hypothesis and
the globalization argument, the analysis of the Dutch case sought to demon-
strate how socio-economic characteristics affect citizens’ positions on old and
new political issues, which subsequently affect attitudes towards democracy.
Here, we found that indeed those at the margin of the economic order tend
to increasingly favour ‘demarcation’ positions on both the socio-economic
and the cultural dimension. Moreover, those issue positions appear to be also
related to more negative attitudes towards democracy.
Finally, though we discussed a variety of relationships that seem to confirm
our expectations, it must be noted that practically all of those relationships
were weak to modest. We are observing tendencies, not molar causation (to
borrow a term from Shadish, Cook and Campbell 2002: 10). Future analyses
should seek to further examine the causal mechanisms connecting processes
of globalization to attitudes towards democracy.
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Globalization, Representation, and Attitudes towards Democracy
Note: * For the purpose of the analyses in Tables 2 and 3, these more fine-grained indicators of social class were
regrouped into lower social class (1–5), higher social class (6–8), and not in the labour force (9).
(Continued)
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Kees Aarts, Jacques Thomassen, and Carolien van Ham
Majoritarian democracies
Australia 2004
Canada 2004
France 2002
Germany 2002
Great Britain 2005
Hungary 2002
Iceland 2003
Ireland 2002
New Zealand 2002
Portugal 2002
Portugal 2005
South Korea 2004
Spain 2004
Taiwan 2001
Taiwan 2004
United States 2004
Not classified
Hong Kong 2004
Source: Two-dimensional factor solution Bernauer et al., executive–parties dimension. Scores below 0 were coded as
majoritarian and scores above 0 as consensus. Classification of economies into high income economies and middle
and lower income economies based on the World Bank classification by GNI per capita 2011 (see: <http://data.world-
bank.org/about/country-classifications>).
B. Eurobarometer
Table B.11.2. Eurobarometer sample: countries and time period included
France 1973–2010
Belgium 1973–2010
The Netherlands 1973–2010
Germany (West & East) 1973–2010
Italy 1973–2010
Luxembourg 1973–2010
Denmark 1973–2010
Ireland 1973–2010
United Kingdom (Great Britain & Northern Ireland) 1973–2010
228
Globalization, Representation, and Attitudes towards Democracy
C. DPES
Table C.11.1 Indicator for ‘feelings of representation’ in DPES
Feelings of representation have been measured in DPES by the external efficacy index, an index
consisting of three survey questions. The external efficacy score is calculated by a count of the
number of ‘not true’ answers to the following questions:
• Members of parliament do not care about the opinions of people like me.
• Political parties are only interested in my vote and not in my opinion.
• People like me have no influence on governmental policy
Citizens with scores of 2 or higher are considered to have high external efficacy.
Notes
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Kees Aarts, Jacques Thomassen, and Carolien van Ham
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Globalization, Representation, and Attitudes towards Democracy
16. The Dutch election studies data cover varying time periods. For some variables,
the full 1971–2010 period is available, for other variables the period is shorter.
17. Although the data have been weighted before the analysis, the relatively low per-
centage of (upper) working class respondents in 2002, 2003, and perhaps even
earlier, may at least partly be attributed to selective non-response. The response
rates in the Dutch election studies had markedly deteriorated after the mid-1980s,
to recover only in 2006 as a result of a set of measures aimed at improving response
quality.
18. Note that the changing composition of the Dutch electorate in terms of socio-
economic groups as demonstrated in Figures 11.4 and 11.5 might nevertheless
affect the overall level of attitudes towards democracy. While group differences
are rather stable, the size of the group with lower socio-economic status has
declined over time, contributing to an aggregate slight increase in levels of politi-
cal support.
19. Note that the findings for satisfaction with democracy need to be interpreted with
some caution because the time series is relatively short. It seems that education
and social class had a hardly noticeable impact on people’s satisfaction with
democracy between 1998 and 2002. The Eurobarometer data for the Netherlands
appear to indicate that the narrow gap between 1998 and 2002 was temporary,
however. After 2002, indeed, satisfaction with democracy appears to follow a simi-
lar pattern as external efficacy: the well-educated and the higher classes tend to be
more often satisfied with democracy than the less well educated and the lower
classes.
20. The peak in 2006 is probably due to the heated discussion around the referendum
on the European Constitutional Treaty in 2005 when 60 per cent of the Dutch
voters voted against the treaty.
231
12
12.1 Introduction
232
Consenting to Lose or Expecting to Win?
233
Eric Chang, Yun-han Chu, and Wen-chin Wu
win the current election (LW), previous winners who lose the current election
(WL), two-time winners (WW), and two-time losers (LL).1
Given our fundamental concerns on democratization, we first narrow our
analytical focus to the third-wave democracies that experience governmental
turnover, including Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Hungary, Poland, and Romania.2
Our results show that satisfaction with democracy among the LW, WL, and
WW groups is not significantly different between these groups, while the LL
group is less satisfied than the other three groups. In other words, our results
demonstrate that both the experience of winning and the expectation of elec-
toral alternation are important in sustaining citizens’ satisfaction with
democracy. Then we expand our sample by including both developing and
established democracies. According to Lipset (1959) and Easton (1965), sup-
port for democratic principles, or the diffuse support for democratic systems
more generally, can only incubate slowly in a mature democratic system. This
‘reservoir of good will’ developed over time in advanced democracies would
then help sustain their citizens’ faith in democracy even when they find
themselves sailing against a tough but temporary economic or political tide
(Thomassen and Van der Kolk 2009). In other words, one can expect this
dynamic winner–loser gap to be smaller in developed democracies than
young democracies, and our empirical analysis shows that it is indeed the
case.
The rest of this chapter proceeds as follows. Section 12.2 discusses the con-
tributions and deficiencies of the extant literature on the winner–loser gap of
satisfaction with democracy and on the two-turnover test. Section 12.3 elabo-
rates our dynamic winner–loser thesis under repeated elections. Section 12.4
tests our hypothesis about the dynamic winner–loser status and presents the
empirical results. Section 12.5 discusses the implications of the results for
democratic consolidation and provides our conclusions.
234
Consenting to Lose or Expecting to Win?
Wm – L m > Wc – L c (3)
235
Eric Chang, Yun-han Chu, and Wen-chin Wu
a set of repeated games in which political actors compete with each other
under certain levels of uncertainty of winning in each round.
Extending from a one-shot game into a repeated-game framework is theo-
retically consequential. In classical game theory, it is well known that new
equilibriums will emerge if the game is played repeatedly because players can
condition their actions in the current round with information available to
them in the previous round (Fudenberg and Tirole 1991). Take the famous
Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD), for example. In a one-shot PD game, each player’s
dominant strategy is to defect, despite the fact that the optimal outcome can
be achieved if players cooperate with each other. As a result, all players are
stuck in a unique Nash equilibrium in which everyone defects and suffers
from the worst outcome. On the contrary, if the PD game is repeatedly played
for an infinite number of times, players can develop some strategies to induce
others’ cooperation instead of defection (Axelrod 1984).3 The important les-
son here is that a player’s action in the current round of a repeated game is
determined by their actions in the past as well as their expectation for the
future.
236
Consenting to Lose or Expecting to Win?
related democratic institutions, such as the judicial system and the mass
media, would not only protect and improve the civil rights and liberties of
the people but would also reinforce individuals’ expectation of others’ coop-
erative behaviours. In this sense, Lindberg emphasizes the role of repeated
elections in democratization and extends Rustow’s (1970) thesis that demo-
cratic behaviour contributes to democratic values.
Parallel to Lindberg, this chapter highlights a particular mechanism
through which repeated elections contribute to democratic consolidation:
the possibility of electoral alternation. We argue that when repeated elections
are institutionalized in nascent democracies, the possibility of electoral alter-
nation provides both critical information and necessary enforcement mecha-
nisms to both current winners and losers. On the one hand, it reminds the
current winners that the electoral victory is merely temporary and that they
are likely to be sitting on the other side of the table after the next election. On
the other hand, it also helps lessen the pain of electoral loss by encouraging
current losers to look to the future. In other words, the possibility of electoral
alternation forges an expectation that repeated elections can alternate not
only the composition of the government but also the status of winners and
losers among individuals. As a result, it becomes common knowledge for all
actors that the winner–loser status is not permanently fixed but transforma-
ble in different rounds of elections. Under such circumstances, electoral alter-
nation creates uncertainty about the future, thereby moderating the current
political attitudes of both types of actors and consequently contributing to
more democratic and optimal outcomes.
Of course, there are myriad ways that an individual forms her expectations.
An extremely pessimistic person, for instance, might think that she would
never stand a chance of winning. While a comprehensive study of how an
individual forms her expectation is beyond the scope of this chapter, we
argue that one common denominator among various individuals is their past
experience. Simply put, we argue that an individual is more likely to believe
that she can be a winner if she has won before. Importantly, we hypothesize
that those who have the experience of being winners are more likely to devel-
op a favourable attitude towards democracy than those who have never expe-
rienced winning before.
Specifically, if we focus on the past two consecutive elections, we could
classify voters into four categories on the basis of their voting history: previ-
ous losers who win the current election (LW), previous winners who lose the
current election (WL), two-time winners (WW), and two-time losers (LL). The
main hypothesis in this chapter, then, is that:
WW = WL = LW > LL (4)
237
Eric Chang, Yun-han Chu, and Wen-chin Wu
Astute readers would notice the conceptual difference between our dynamic
framework and the conventional winner/loser thesis. Specifically, we argue
that it is the experience of being winners, not the current winner/loser status per
se, that enhances voters’ satisfaction with democracy. In other words, the cur-
rent losers may not be necessarily less satisfied than current winners, because
some of them may be previous winners and still hold some support for the
democratic system (i.e. the WL group). Only repeated losers, the LL group,
will be less satisfied with the system than other groups.
One might reasonably suspect that the two-time winners should exhibit
higher levels of satisfaction with democracy than one-time winners. On the
other hand, in the case where electoral alteration occurs, the WW group con-
sists of individuals who switch from the previous incumbent party to the
current winning party. To the best of our knowledge, no one has directly
investigated the changes of democratic attitudes of citizens who shift their
votes between consecutive elections; yet a recent study on vote shifting by
Chang (2010) may provide some useful clues. According to Chang (2010: 77),
vote shifting is ‘a form of rational voting consisting of critical evaluations of
government performance and careful weighing of policy issues’. Importantly,
Chang shows that among previous incumbent supporters in East Asian
democracies, those who have drifted apart from the incumbent on important
policy issues and those who are dissatisfied with government performance
are more likely to withdraw their electoral support from the previous incum-
bent and vote for the current winning party. In the case of government alter-
nation, two-time winners are exactly those vote shifters who supported the
previous incumbent yet chose to change their electoral allegiance to the new
winner. Extending this rationale, it seems reasonable to assume that the sat-
isfaction with democracy of two-time winners during electoral alternation
may be decreased due to their disappointing experience with the past govern-
ment. In sum, given the lack of a clear theoretical foundation, we consider
the difference between two-time winners and one-time winners an empirical
question that can best be answered through data analysis.
Before proceeding, it is worth noting that an emerging literature has also
started to re-examine the winner–loser thesis from a dynamic perspective. In
their subsequent landmark study, Anderson et al. (2005, Chapter 4) investi-
gate how the winner–loser gap of democratic satisfaction evolves inter-tem-
porally in Britain, Germany, and Spain, and they report three major findings.
First, they demonstrate that when a citizen’s winner–loser status changes
because of government alternation, her democratic satisfaction would change
as well. As a result, electoral alternation also yields a substantial shift in the
winner–loser gap. Second, they further demonstrate that the winner–loser
gap persists over time. In other words, losers’ dissatisfaction with democracy
is not just a transient disheartenment but a discontent with the current
238
Consenting to Lose or Expecting to Win?
government over the entire electoral cycle. Finally, Anderson et al. show that
repeated defeat in the electoral arena gradually undermines citizens’ demo-
cratic satisfaction due to the accumulation of post-election frustration. Spe-
cifically, Anderson et al. (2005: 63) find that in Britain and Germany, losers’
democratic satisfaction starts to decline after being defeated in two elections
in a row.
The finding of Anderson et al. provides a parallel and important insight to
our study. Specifically, their study emphasizes the importance of being able to
change the winner–loser status over time. Because of this possibility, current
losers may accept their defeat with an expectation that they will win in the
future. Importantly, it is exactly this possibility of being able to win in the
future that constitutes what Anderson et al. call ‘the losers’ consent’ that legit-
imizes and continues the practices of democracy. On the other hand, howev-
er, our study differs from Anderson et al.’s in at least three important aspects.
First, at the operationalization level, Anderson et al. define the winner–
loser status based on whether a citizen supports a given party before an elec-
tion, and then they make their inference of dynamic effects with a static
measure. With this operationalization, Anderson et al. make an assumption
that voters never change their voting pattern in a sequence of elections. Then
they aggregate the level of satisfaction with democracy among the same
group of voters and show how their frustration of losing accumulates and
hence leads to their declining democratic satisfaction. As we shall elaborate
below, we relax this strict assumption on voting behaviour and employ a
more realistic measurement to pin down the changes of winner–loser status
during two consecutive elections. We believe that our operationalization of
dynamic winner–loser status can better capture the effects of repeated losing,
since it can differentiate repeated losers from the current losers who are in
fact previous winners but shift their votes to the losing parties in the current
election. Meanwhile, our individual-level research design can further help us
more accurately estimate the effect of changes in the winner–loser status on
one’s democratic attitudes.
Second, at the empirical test level, our study provides a more direct way to
test the dynamic winner–loser gap. Specifically, while Anderson et al. focus
on how repeated loss in elections gradually deteriorates losers’ satisfaction
with democracy over time, in this chapter we focus explicitly on the gap of
democratic satisfaction between those constant losers and those who have
become winners in recent elections. Similarly, while Anderson et al. force-
fully demonstrate a consistent and persistent winner–loser gap throughout
the time period they examine, their study does not rule out the possibility
that winners’ democratic satisfaction may also simultaneously decline with
losers’. In fact, Anderson et al. (2005: 59–60) point out that the ‘euphoria’ of
unifying with their former communist neighbour pleases both winners and
239
Eric Chang, Yun-han Chu, and Wen-chin Wu
losers in West Germany during the late 1980s, but the post-unification ‘hang-
over’ knocks down the democratic satisfaction of both winners and losers in
the early 1990s. They also provide visual evidence that winners’ satisfaction
with democracy also fluctuates over time (see their figures). Hence, one
remains unclear regarding whether the winner–loser gap widens or shrinks
over time.
The final distinction between this chapter and Anderson et al. is the sam-
pling strategy. Since Anderson et al. are mainly interested in the consequenc-
es of repeated losing, their analysis covers both developing and established
democracies in which a certain party or party coalition dominates elections
over a long period of time. On the other hand, we derive our theoretical focus
from Huntington’s two-turnover test. Therefore, we limit our sample within
nascent democracies in which the latest government turnovers reshuffle the
identity of most previous winner and losers.
In addition to Anderson et al. (2005), a recent study by Curini et al. (2012)
has also begun to examine how inter-temporal changes of winner–loser sta-
tus affect individuals’ political attitudes in two consecutive elections. They
show that voters are more satisfied with democracy if they perceive that the
government is closer to their ideal point along the left–right ideological
dimension. On the one hand, they argue that winning for the first time dra-
matically enhances citizens’ satisfaction with democracy. On the other hand,
however, they assert that the marginal increase in satisfaction when winning
again decreases unless the ideological distance between winners and the gov-
ernment decreases.
While we address a similar question about the inter-temporal change of
winner–loser status, we adopt a considerably different perspective from that
of Curini et al. (2012). First, Curini et al. include 31 countries covered by the
CSES 2 project, but we only focus on cases of government alternation in
power in our analysis. This distinction results in dramatic contextual differ-
ence when specifying the dynamic winner–loser status because the occur-
rence (absence) of government alternation makes most previous winners
(losers) become losers (winners) in the current election. Take the US presiden-
tial elections, for example. If we formulate the dynamic winner–loser status
for the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, the LL group is mainly com-
posed of Democrats. In contrast, if we focus on the 2004 and 2008 presiden-
tial elections, the LL group will be mainly composed of switch voters who
voted for Kerry in 2004 but McCain in 2008. Obviously, these two groups can
have quite different political attitudes and opinions (even though they both
share the same LL label). Without making a conceptual distinction between
the presence and the absence of electoral alternation, we would blindly and
mistakenly pool these two very different groups into the same category,
which would lead to erroneous inferences.
240
Consenting to Lose or Expecting to Win?
Second, our substantive results and conclusion differ greatly from Curini
et al.’s. They argue that two-time winners (WW) should be the most satisfied
group, followed by previous losers who win the current election (LW), previ-
ous winners who lose the current election (WL), and finally, two-time losers
(LL). By contrast, we find that the level of satisfaction with democracy is sta-
tistically indistinguishable among those who win at least once. Moreover, our
results indicate that the levels of democratic satisfaction of those who experi-
ence winning at least once are significantly higher than those who never
have the chance to celebrate electoral victories. While Curini et al. argue for
the primacy of winning the current election (especially for those who lost the
previous time), we emphasize the importance of winning at least once,
regardless of which election. We applaud their efforts of exploring the mar-
ginal effect of inter-temporal change of winner–loser status, yet we conclude
that their methods are likely to be ineffective and lead to spurious results.
More specifically, to effectively probe the marginal effect of the inter-temporal
change of winner–loser status, one should trace the inter-temporal change of
the dependent variable; unfortunately, however, this critical information is
not available in the CSES 2 data.4
Finally, while Curini et al. usefully investigate the impact of ideological
proximity between citizens and government, we maintain that it is overly
simplistic to use one single left–right dimension to capture the ideological
proximity across all 31 countries comprising well established and newly
emerging democracies. Instead of ideological proximity, this chapter focuses
on government alternation in young democracies. Since the occurrence of
government alternation sufficiently implies an increase (decrease) of the ide-
ological proximity between current winners (losers) and the new government
along the major political cleavage(s) in a given country, the issue of ideologi-
cal proximity is then embedded within our analysis.
241
Eric Chang, Yun-han Chu, and Wen-chin Wu
242
Consenting to Lose or Expecting to Win?
Table 12.1. Satisfaction with democracy and support for democracy (%)
Satisfaction with Not satisfied at all Not very Fairly satisfied Very satisfied Total
democracy satisfied
14.84 33.58 41.44 10.14 100(N=17,162)
Support for Strongly disagree Disagree Agree Strongly agree Total
democracy 3.49 8.68 44.24 43.59 100(N=16,918)
Note: Satisfaction with democracy is measured by the following question: ‘On the whole, are you very satisfied, fairly
satisfied, not very satisfied, or not at all satisfied with the way democracy works in your country?’ Support for democ-
racy is measured by the following question: ‘Do you agree strongly, agree, disagree, or disagree strongly with this
statement that “Democracy may have problems but it’s better than any other form of government”?’
answers to this question. As we can see, 48.42 per cent of the respondents
are dissatisfied with the democracy practices in their countries, while the
other 51.58 per cent are satisfied. Thus, we recode this four-category varia-
ble into a binary one.
243
Eric Chang, Yun-han Chu, and Wen-chin Wu
for democracy, is as small as 0.18. This distinction not only reinforces the
notion that democratic support is a multidimensional concept but also pro-
vides us more opportunities to investigate how the dynamic winner–loser
status influences democratic attitudes among individuals.
Current election
Loser Winner
Note: N = 5566. Voters are coded as losers if their voted candidates or parties
are excluded from the post-election governments.
244
Consenting to Lose or Expecting to Win?
245
Eric Chang, Yun-han Chu, and Wen-chin Wu
β0 j = γ 00 + δ0 j (6)
246
Consenting to Lose or Expecting to Win?
Variables Models
LW 0.672*** 0.588***
[0.212] [0.199]
WL 1.050*** 0.514***
[0.194] [0.188]
WW 1.034*** 0.681***
[0.185] [0.177]
Wint1 0.027
[0.132]
Wint0 0.238
[0.160]
Winner 0.284 –0.022
[0.177] [0.141]
Young –1.619*** –0.980***
[0.406] [0.357]
Winner × 0.596** 0.603***
Young
[0.245] [0.216]
Partisan –0.003 0.373*** –0.089 0.107 0.155** 0.425***
[0.108] [0.101] [0.130] [0.144] [0.074] [0.067]
Perform 1.166*** 0.398*** 1.215*** 0.882*** 1.094*** 0.223***
[0.088] [0.074] [0.108] [0.111] [0.055] [0.046]
Corrupt –0.176** –0.078 –0.096 –0.123 –0.305*** –0.074
[0.071] [0.069] [0.087] [0.094] [0.049] [0.045]
Constant –3.557*** –2.056*** –2.829*** –2.403*** –1.395*** –0.737**
[0.450] [0.386] [0.520] [0.532] [0.397] [0.333]
N 2103 2005 1392 1211 4802 4722
Note: The dependent variable is democratic satisfaction, except for Model 2 and Model 6, which use democratic sup-
port as the dependent variable. Standard errors in brackets. * p < 0.1, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01. All tests are two-detailed.
question then is whether the two-time winners have more favourable demo-
cratic attitudes than those who win just one time. Eyeballing the coefficients of
three dummy variables in both Model 1 and Model 2 suggests that they are
roughly equivalent. Nevertheless, we systematically examine the group differ-
ences in additional models. Therefore, we create two dummy variables, Wint0
and Wint1, to denote winners in the previous and the current elections, respec-
tively. Model 3 analyses whether losing the current election may result in lower
satisfaction with democracy among previous winners. In other words, we com-
pare the WL group and the WW group and see if the latter shows more faith in
democratic systems. As we can see, the coefficient of Wint1 is statistically insig-
nificant, suggesting that there is no observable difference between the WL and
WW groups in terms of satisfaction with democracy.
Similarly, Model 4 investigates whether the experience of being a loser in
the previous election may influence individual satisfaction with democracy
among current winners. That is, we compare the democratic attitudes between
247
Eric Chang, Yun-han Chu, and Wen-chin Wu
β0 j = γ 00 + γ 01Young + δ0 j (9)
where εij, δ0j, and δ1j are independently normally distributed disturbance
terms.
Combining equations (8) to (10), we get the following random coefficient
model:
248
Consenting to Lose or Expecting to Win?
the dummy variable Winner are associated with the winner–loser gap of politi-
cal attitudes, so we should expect that the interaction term Winner × Young is
significant and positive. Using democratic satisfaction as the dependent varia-
ble, Model 5 demonstrates that the coefficient of Winner is insignificant but the
coefficient Winner × Young is significant and positive as expected. These results
not only indicate that the winner–loser gap is larger in young democracies
than in their developed counterparts, but also implies that the winner–loser
gap in developed democracies is indistinguishable under our conceptualiza-
tion of dynamic winner–loser status. The same conclusion can be drawn from
Model 6 when we use democratic support as the dependent variable.
Figure 12.1 further highlights the main findings of our research. Based on
the estimation of Model 5, we simulated the predicted probabilities with their
95 per cent confidence intervals of being satisfied with democracy for win-
ners and losers between young and developed democracies. Specifically,
Figure 12.1 illustrates that in young democracies constant electoral losers
(i.e. LL) are less likely to be satisfied with democracy than their cohorts expe-
riencing the winner status at least once (i.e. LW, WL, and WW). A similar case
is also found in developed democracies, as illustrated in Figure 12.1, where
the point estimate of predicted probability for losers is lower than that of
.75
Predicted Probability
.5
.25
0
Loser Winner Loser Winner
Young Democracies Developed Democracies
249
Eric Chang, Yun-han Chu, and Wen-chin Wu
winners. This result is consistent with Anderson et al. (2005), who show that
satisfaction with democracy is substantially lower among repeated losers in
three European countries (i.e. Britain, Germany, and Spain). However, as
shown in Figure 12.1, the overlapped 95 per cent confidence intervals of pre-
dicted probabilities between winners and losers in developed democracies
imply an indistinguishable winner–loser gap. In other words, being electoral
winners matters more to citizens in young democracies than to those in
developed democracies, because constant losers may express significantly
lower support for the democratic system after losing limited rounds of elec-
tions. By contrast, as democratic practices are repeated and consolidated,
constant losers may either have experienced winner status or have more good
beliefs of becoming winners in the future.
250
Consenting to Lose or Expecting to Win?
certain group of citizens are chronically excluded from sharing the political
pie in democratic systems.
Since this chapter emphasizes the importance of the experience of winning
at least once for the consolidation of democracy, we can also extend this logic
to argue for the importance of the expectation of winning in young democra-
cies. While citizens in established democracies have become more accus-
tomed to electoral alternation as the fortunes of parties shift over time, those
in young democracies may still be new to the electoral game and have not
experienced both winning and losing after the founding election. In this
sense, current winners in new democracies will gradually learn how to win
humbly as they form a reasonable expectation that they may not be holding
their office permanently. Meanwhile, current losers will come to realize that
the recent defeat is merely temporary and that sooner or later there will be
another opportunity to determine who holds political power. In order to
forge a consensus about new rules of the game after the democratic transi-
tion, it is imperative that current losers will not be permanently excluded
from political power but will have chances to contest and win subsequent
elections.
Additionally, our analytical focus on electoral alternations is well situated
with a growing body of literature that investigates the role of alternation in
the democratization process. Bratton (2004) first reports the alternation
effects in Africa in which citizens’ political attitudes toward the democracy
decline with the passage of time since the initial alternation. He further sug-
gests that routine elections restore citizens’ faith in democracy. Meanwhile,
Moehler and Lindberg (2009) find that the winners and losers converge in
their perceptions of institutional legitimacy after government alternation
and argue for a positive effect of electoral alternation on democratic consoli-
dation. Finally, Cho and Logan (2010) argue that electoral alternation also
reduces the gap of perceived democratic durability between winners and los-
ers. According to Cho and Logan (2010: 1), electoral alternations not only
widen the pool of individuals who ‘feel that they have a strong stake in the
system’, but also make them more confident in political elites’ commitment
to democracy after alternations.
Nevertheless, our research suffers from the limitation that we cannot exam-
ine the institutional effects on the winner–loser gap of democratic attitudes
as others have done (Anderson and Guillory 1997; Cho and Bratton 2006),
because we lack institutional variations in our sample of six young democra-
cies that experience government alternations during the survey period of
CSES 2. However, this inadequacy does not necessarily invalidate the main
findings in this chapter because our conceptualization of dynamic winner–
loser status can be regarded as a synthesis of electoral history and political
institutions. More specifically, once we take individual voting history into
251
Eric Chang, Yun-han Chu, and Wen-chin Wu
account, it seems not surprising that the winner–loser gap is larger in SMD
systems than in their PR counterparts. Since SMD systems favour large parties
(Duverger 1962; Taagepera and Shugart 1989), supporters of small parties
have a lower probability of becoming winners in SMD systems. By contrast,
in PR systems, it is rather common to see a coalition government formed by
various small parties after the election (Lijphart 1999). Accordingly, the cur-
rent losers from small parties in PR systems, on average, are not as marginal-
ized as in SMD systems because they either had assumed winner status before
or may have more confidence of being winners in the future. Of course, a
more systematic study that integrates the dynamic winner–loser status with
political institutions awaits further research.
Notes
252
Consenting to Lose or Expecting to Win?
253
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Index
Aarts, K. 3–4, 15, 19, 99, 103, 201, 206, 229, 256 Comparative Study of Electoral Systems
accountability 1–4, 6–7, 17, 60, 62, 101, 135 (CSES) 1, 5, 19–21, 24, 33–5, 60, 63, 80,
function of elections 1–4, 6, 17, 101, 135 103, 113, 118–19, 121, 125, 138, 140, 207,
model of 2–4, 17, 135 209, 225, 233
Anderson, C. J. 5, 19, 64, 100, 102, 105, 113, consensus
122, 188–9, 232–3, 235, 238–40, 250, 256 (model of) democracy 1–10, 12–13, 15–27,
29–34, 36, 38–42, 44, 51–6, 58–61,
63–4, 68, 72, 76–8, 83–4, 92–3, 95–6,
Banducci, S. A. 101, 113–14, 127 100–1, 105–9, 111, 113–16, 120, 122–3,
Bartels, L. M. 245 126–8, 131, 135–6, 139, 147–52, 163–4,
benefits of participation 113, 117 183, 185, 189, 195, 197, 206- 7, 211–15,
Bernauer, J. 7, 20, 22, 24, 27, 30, 37, 45, 54–6, 226–8, 235, 251, 256
60, 72, 105–6, 114–15, 120, 123, 131, 136, versus majoritarian democracy 6–7, 41, 61,
147, 149, 214, 228 72, 78, 148–9, 163
bicameralism 20–1, 26, 29, 35, 62, 105 constitutional federalism 21, 26, 29, 35, 128,
Blais, A. 10, 99, 103, 113–14, 117, 122, 124, 183
127, 256 constitutional rigidity 21, 26, 29–31, 33–5
Brady, H. 116 contacting politicians 122, 123, 128
Brambor, T. 53 corruption 15, 158, 163–9, 173, 188, 190–1,
Bratton, M. 251 193–9, 244–6, 253, 256
Brooks, C. 80, 94–5 crisis of legitimacy 201
Budge, I. 48, 80 Cukierman, A. 27, 36–7
Burke, E. 133 cultural dimension 120, 204–6, 209, 212, 217,
Burlacu, D. 8, 60 222, 225–6
cultural revolution 203–4, 206
calculus of voting 8, 45 Curini, L. 240–1, 252
campaign activity 11, 118–30
central bank independence 22, 27, 29–30, 34, 36
Chang, E. C. C. 16, 232, 238 Dahl, R. A. 39, 43, 114, 187, 245
Cho, W. 251 measure of polyarchy 114
civic duty 99, 115 Dalton, R. J. 3, 11, 19, 80, 83, 85, 113, 116,
Civic Voluntarism Model 116 131, 201–3, 207
civil society 12, 116, 128, 205 De Montesquieu, C. L. 133
clarity of democracy
policy positions 8, 42, 45, 48, 50–3, 55–9, 76 age of 13, 86, 105–8, 120, 124–5, 131, 135,
political supply 8, 42, 45, 48, 50–3, 57–9 148–9, 151–2, 160, 163, 168, 170–1,
responsibility 3, 6, 13–14, 18–19, 153, 173, 175, 190, 192, 195–6, 214
159–62, 164–7, 169–73, 175, 177–80 dimensions of 2, 10, 20–2, 28–34, 40–1, 44,
Clark, T. N. 53, 85 46, 58, 61, 72, 75, 83, 105–8, 114, 120,
class 123, 197, 206, 209, 212, 217, 222, 225
or union membership voting 90–1, 93–4, 96 direct 7–8, 13, 18, 21–4, 27–34, 36, 47, 76,
voting 79, 83, 85, 90–7, 230 107, 127, 131, 133, 136, 168, 171, 239
cleavage politics 80, 86, 97, 204, 241 patterns of 4, 7, 20–2, 24, 28, 30, 40, 92,
cognitive mobilization 15, 202 106, 113, 120, 122–3, 128, 131, 178,
communal action 118 180, 185–6, 192, 196, 221, 224
275
Index
276
Index
left–right 8–9, 40, 44–59, 61, 63–8, 72–5, negative effects thesis 13, 96, 160, 202–3,
77–8, 80, 86, 88, 102, 116, 123, 128, 206–8, 214, 221, 226
149–50, 199, 203, 206, 240–1 Nie, N. 113, 117–18
dimension 8–9, 44–6, 48, 54, 56, 58, 61, 63, Norris, P. 25, 35, 83, 85–6, 88, 113, 117, 119,
77–8, 128, 199, 206, 240–1 123, 178, 201–2, 242
ideological dimension 8–9, 46, 61, 63, 77,
128, 240–1 older democracies 13, 77–8, 87, 95, 98, 126,
positions 8, 40, 44–5, 48–53, 55–9, 61, 66, 139, 141–2, 151, 160, 175
72, 75, 102 output institutions 14–15, 18, 183, 188–94,
scale 40, 44–6, 48–50, 52–6, 58–9, 61, 65, 197, 201, 242
75, 78, 149 oversized cabinets 24, 29, 35
self-placement 53, 55, 57, 64–7, 73–4, 78, oversized coalitions 24, 35, 62
86, 149–50
legitimacy (of the political system) 13, 16, 19, participation
113, 153, 157, 160–1, 174, 181–2, 201, conventional 115, 117, 124, 126, 130
203, 225, 232, 243, 245, 251, 256 unconventional 117, 124
libertarian revolution 203–4 parties, effective number of 24, 28–9, 35, 41,
libertarian-authoritarian dimension 45, 93, 105, 122, 136, 147
204–5 partisanship 53, 73, 244–5, 253
Lijphart, A. 2, 4–5, 7–8, 10–13, 15, 19–30, strength of 73, 244–5, 253
32–4, 37–41, 44–5, 52, 54–6, 58–60, 62–3, party
67, 72, 83, 97, 113–15, 120, 123, 128, attachment 30, 117, 129
135–6, 163, 165, 167–70, 189–90, 195–7, identification 53, 65–7, 100–1, 106–8, 111,
199–200 114, 123–4, 126–7, 149, 245
Lindberg, S. I. 236–7, 251 strength of 65–7, 245
Linz, J. J. 234 Manifesto Project 45–6
Lipset, S. M. 79, 82–3, 85–6, 97, 205–6, 234 platforms 42, 45–6, 48, 50–1, 58, 85, 107, 163
Logan, C. 251 representation 2, 7, 10–11, 16, 18, 21,
Lundell, K. 3, 26, 35–6 39–42, 44–5, 52–4, 58–60, 79, 82, 87,
99–103, 105–11, 114, 121–2, 134, 137,
143, 145–9, 151–2, 159, 164, 166,
Madison, J. 133 168–9, 173, 183, 194–5, 199, 209, 214,
Magalhães, P. C. 9, 79 230, 256
Mainwaring, S. 86–7 system 3, 7, 9–11, 16, 18–19, 21, 23, 25, 35,
majoritarian (model of) democracy/ 40–2, 45–6, 48, 51–3, 58–61, 64, 66, 69,
majoritarian institutions 2–13, 15–27, 73, 75, 82–3, 85, 87, 97–8, 100–3, 105–8,
32–6, 38–42, 44, 52, 55, 58–62, 64, 67, 72, 110–11, 116–17, 121–4, 126–8, 144,
75, 77–8, 82–4, 101, 113–16, 123, 127–8, 146–7, 149–52, 157–9, 161, 163, 165,
135–6, 138–40, 146–52, 163, 173, 183, 168, 173, 183, 208, 235, 238, 245, 256
189, 197, 206–7, 211–15, 226–8, Pedersen index 69, 70, 75
235, 256 Peffley, M. 14, 181, 183
majoritarian versus consensus democracy 6–7, performance
41, 61, 72, 78, 148 -based voting 8, 60–63, 65, 76, 78
Mandate Model 2, 133–6 evaluations 8, 14, 62–71, 74–5, 78, 153,
Manza, J. 80, 94–5 157, 161, 174, 181–4, 186, 188–93,
McAllister, I. 80, 101, 131 195–200, 233, 238, 242, 245
meaningful choices 8, 38–40, 42, 51–2, 58–9 of the incumbent government 2, 3, 7, 157,
meaningful elections 7, 8, 39–40, 42–3, 51, 184, 238
58–9 -oriented voting 9, 61, 65–6, 75, 78
median voter 23, 41–2, 84 personal vote 78, 85, 99, 127, 188
minority cabinets 24, 29, 35, 83 personalization of politics 84, 128
minority government 62, 64, 128, 174, 185 plebiscites 23, 27
modernization thesis 15, 202, 226 plurality
Moehler, D. C. 251 electoral systems 13, 18, 100, 138, 140, 153,
multipartism 62 159–62, 168, 171, 174–5
multiparty system 3, 9, 20, 23, 35, 42, 60, 69, system 13, 18, 100, 138, 140, 153, 158–63,
73, 75, 102, 175, 206 165, 167–8, 171, 173–5, 179
277
Index
polarization 6, 8–10, 18–19, 62–3, 72–3, 76–7, support 14–15, 153, 158, 166, 168, 171,
102, 105, 107, 110–11, 116, 121, 123, 174, 181, 183–4, 186–7, 189, 197,
125–6 242–3, 245–6, 250, 253
policy religiosity-based voting 80, 90, 96
-based voting 8, 18, 45, 60–3, 65, 72–3, religious voting 9, 79–81, 89–91, 94–8, 130
76–8, 100, 132, 134 representation
congruence 61, 111, 134, 136–8, 142, feelings of 10, 13, 15–16, 100, 102–3,
149–50 105–11, 139, 141–2, 144, 147–9, 151,
mandate model 2, 133–6 195, 209, 214, 229–30
-oriented voting 9, 18, 61, 65–6, 75, 78, 134 from above 7, 10, 44, 103, 133, 166
representation 1, 2, 6–7, 12–13, 18, 38–40, from below 20, 133, 166, 188, 190
42, 44–5, 52–4, 58–60, 82, 100–2, 111, function of elections 1, 2, 6, 13–14, 54, 101,
133–9, 141–3, 145–9, 151–2, 159, 168, 108, 135, 174, 188
174–5, 186 perceptions of 6, 11–15, 18, 42, 45, 52, 58,
voting 8–9, 12, 18, 39–40, 42–5, 51–3, 99–103, 106–8, 110–11, 141, 145,
58–63, 65–6, 72–8, 82, 84, 100, 111, 149, 164, 174, 182, 187–9, 191,
128, 132, 134, 136, 159, 238, 245 194–6, 199
political efficacy 103, 106, 108, 114, 117, sense of 39, 45, 52, 59, 101, 115, 168–9,
123–5, 127, 212, 217, 221, 223, 225–6, 172–3, 190, 229
229, 231 substantive 14, 39, 58, 181, 183, 186–8,
political protest 114, 117–21, 124–6, 128, 131 192, 194
political representation, quality of 6, 12–15, representativeness 4, 6, 7, 17, 135
21, 38–40, 113, 183, 187–8, 190, 192, responsible Party Model 2, 3, 40, 42, 50, 134
194–6, 199 responsiveness 8–9, 15, 60–1, 76–7, 100–1,
populist parties 203, 206, 229 245
populist revolution 203, 206 retrospective evaluations of government 43,
positive effects thesis 13, 96, 158, 160, 202–3, 62, 134
207–8, 214, 226 retrospective voting 8, 18, 43, 62, 134
Powell, G. B. 2–4, 12, 25, 38, 60–62, 101–2, Rohrschneider, R. 14, 181, 183–4, 189, 199
136, 189, 245 Rokkan, S. 79, 82–3, 86, 97, 204
power Rustow, D. A. 237
efficacy 117, 124–5, 129, 217
-sharing 5, 22–4, 26, 62, 251 Samuels, D. 84
presidential systems 9, 37, 78, 84–5, 94, 96, Sanction Model 3–4, 133–5
116, 123, 125–6, 252 Sanders, D. 13, 153, 182, 189
presidentialism 37, 84, 85, 93, 95–7, 252 satisfaction with democracy 1–3, 5–6, 12–14,
principal-agent model 100 16–18, 66, 68, 75, 117, 123–5, 136, 153–4,
procedural fairness 14, 182–3, 187–8, 193, 195 156–61, 166–8, 171–6, 179–81, 183–6,
proportional (electoral) system 3, 10–11, 16, 197, 206–9, 211–12, 214, 216–17, 219–21,
18, 20, 25, 35, 38, 40–1, 45, 60–1, 100–2, 223–6, 230–5, 238–43, 245, 247–50, 256
105, 107–8, 110, 114, 122, 136, 138–9, Schlozman, K. L. 116
146–50, 159, 171, 173–4, 183, 189, Schmitt, H. 7, 38, 47–8, 58, 101, 137–8, 184,
206, 232 199, 256
proportional representation 2, 10–11, 16, Schumpeter, J. 1–2
18, 20, 38, 40–1, 44–5, 60, 100–2, 105, Secularization 85
107–10, 114, 122, 136, 138–9, 146–9, 159, semi-presidential system 9, 93–4, 96, 252
171, 173–4, 183, 189, 232 Shepsle, K. A. 38
protest activity 117–21, 124–6, 128–9 Shikano, S. 22
Proximity Voting 12, 39–42, 44–5, 51–3, Shugart, M. S. 84, 158
58–9, 241 Siaroff, A. 25, 35–6
Przeworski, A. 109, 236 Singh, S. P. 10, 99, 105, 114
single-member district (SMD) systems 232
referendum 23, 26–7, 34, 36, 188, 231 social cleavage(s) 19, 79–80, 82–3, 85–87
regime model 86
performance 13–14, 153, 157, 160–1, 166, theory 80, 86
168–9, 171–6, 181, 183–4, 186, 188–90, social modernization 15, 81, 85–6, 98, 202,
195–7, 236, 242, 245, 253 207, 226
278
Index
social-economic dimension 9, 90, 108, 204–6, Van der Eijk, C. 47–8, 58, 87, 98
209–10, 212, 214, 217, 222, 225–6, 230 Van Ham, C. 15, 201
Soroka, S. 139 Vanhanen’s index of democracy 114
Stepan, A. C. 234 Vatter, A. 7, 20, 22–4, 27, 30, 35–7, 45, 54–6,
Stevenson, R. T. 62, 64–5 60, 72, 105–6, 114, 131, 136, 147, 149
Stewart, M. 13, 153 Verba, S. 113, 116–18, 256
Stramski, J. 4, 60–1 Verba and Nie’s modes of political action
structural voting 9, 45, 52, 62, 79–98 118
veto players theory 23
Taagepera, R. 22, 24, 27, 30, 33, 35, 105, 158
third-wave democracies 33, 37, 87, 95, 234, 241 Weldon, S. 11, 113, 116
Thomassen, J. J. A. 1–4, 15, 19, 38, 40, 42, 98, Wessels, B. 7, 19, 38, 101, 138
135, 138, 201, 206, 256 Whitefield, S. 245
Toka, G. 8, 154 Whiteley, P. 13, 153, 158
trust in political leaders 201, 256 Whitten, G. D. 62, 102
turnout 5, 10–12, 99–101, 103–6, 108–11, winner–loser gap 16, 19, 232–5, 238–40,
113–16, 118–20, 122–4, 126–8, 130–1, 136 248–52
two-turnover test 16, 233–4, 240, 250 Wlezien, C. 139
279