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36 results

Page 1 of 2

Ideological Representation: Achieved and Astray
  • Elections, Institutions, and the Breakdown of Ideological Congruence in Parliamentary Democracies
  • G. Bingham Powell, Jr
  • Published online:
    06 May 2019
    Print publication:
    09 May 2019
  • Ideological congruence is the term generally used in comparative politics for the representative relationship between the general preferences of citizens and the perceived and stated position of government. This study provides a systematic comparative assessment of success and failure in achieving ideological congruence in nineteen developed parliamentary democracies from 1996 through to 2017. It then deconstructs the processes through which elections can connect citizens and governments into the three major stages: citizens' votes in parliamentary elections; the conversion of those votes into legislative representation; the election of prime ministers by their parliaments and the appointment of cabinet ministers. Analyzing these three stages shows that average distance from the median citizen increases at each stage, with only a few remarkable recoveries once congruence begins to go astray.

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

  • G. Bingham Powell, Jr.
  • Journal:
    Perspectives on Politics / Volume 11 / Issue 1 / March 2013
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    19 March 2013, pp. 9-21
    Print publication:
    March 2013

  • Democratic theory assumes that successful democratic representation will create close ideological congruence between citizens and their governments. The success of different types of election rules in creating such congruence is an ongoing target of political science research. As often in political science, a widely demonstrated empirical finding, the greater congruence associated with proportional representation election rules, has ceased to hold. I suggest that systematically taking account in our theories of conditional effects of local context can often provide a remedy. The systematic incorporation of levels of political party polarization into theory of election laws and ideological congruence extended the temporal and spatial range of the theory. Data from the Comparative Manifesto research program and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) research program are used to test the revised theory empirically. Suggestions for generalizing our theories of political context are offered. The results of this research continue the interactions between substantive research, ongoing political events, and the great normative issues of representation and democracy.

  • Election Laws, Disproportionality and Median Correspondence: Implications for Two Visions of Democracy

  • G. BINGHAM POWELL JR, GEORG S. VANBERG
  • Journal:
    British Journal of Political Science / Volume 30 / Issue 3 / July 2000
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    01 July 2000, pp. 383-411

  • Comparative studies of election rules and legislative representation have focused intensively on vote–seat disproportionality as an indication of poor representation. Beginning with citizens' preferences, rather than votes, has important advantages and is especially more appropriate for a majoritarian vision of democracy. We analyse the effect of election rules on both vote–seat correspondence and median left–right correspondence in seventy elections in seventeen countries. We show theoretically the stringent conditions necessary to reduce vote–seat disproportionality in high threshold systems and empirically their high variance (and higher levels) of distortion. Although good median correspondence could be created, in theory, under a wide range of electoral systems, our empirical results suggest that proportional representation (PR) systems tend to outperform single-member district (SMD) systems by this criterion also.

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