Political moderation in developed economies after World War II owed much to the large number of stable, well-paying industrial jobs. The decline in the number of working-class jobs has dealt a hard blow to parties on the center-left, causing them to fragment into smaller and more extreme parties. This is especially true in proportional representation electoral systems, which give voters little reason to vote for large parties in the political middle. Employing a novel dataset of parties’ vote share and seat share in 35 OECD countries from 1945 to 2017, we find that every 20 percent drop in the number of industrial jobs adds one more party on the left. We find a corresponding decline in policy moderation as the left fragments. In the United States and Britain, where majoritarian electoral rules limit party fragmentation, economic insecurity takes other forms including attacks on parties’ ability to formulate and implement moderate policies.

INTRODUCTION

Democratic elections empower winners with a time-bound right to govern. It might be for a fixed term, as in the United States, or a fixed term that can be shortened by the prime minister's decision to call an early election or a no-confidence vote in the parliament, as in the United Kingdom. Some democratic constitutions make provision for recall elections, which, in effect, make the government's tenure conditional on the continuing confidence of the electorate. Recall elections date back to ancient Greece, but they are rare among modern democracies and even more rarely are they successfully deployed. Recalls are difficult to engineer even when they are provided for, as was evident when Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez fought off a recall referendum in 2004 and when Wisconsin governor Scott Walker survived a recall election in 2012. As well as the usual advantages of incumbency, recall petitioners must avoid numerous procedural tripwires as they gather large numbers of signatures, and they must do it with scant institutional support. Constitutions that provide for recall seem to have made provision for John Locke's exceptional “long train of abuses” rather than normal democratic politics.

One might speculate as to why governments are not subject to more robust continuing confidence requirements on the part of electorates. This could have to do with considerations of efficiency, with empowering governments to take unpopular measures whose benefits might not be immediately realized, or with other factors. Whatever the reason, elected governments regard themselves as free to govern unencumbered by that constraint, which would make representative government more likely to shadow what a direct democracy would do. Governments in representative democracies must pass final exams; they are not subject to continuous assessment.

This is not to say that democratic politics stops between elections. Shaping the legislation that governments enact, slowing down or curtailing the scope of unwelcome change, fund-raising and jockeying for positions in future elections, and building support with constituents are all ongoing political activities that are punctuated by elections rather than ended by them.

This volume is one of seven books to grow out of the Yale Political Science Department's initiative on Rethinking Political Order. It emerged from a conference on “Representation and Popular Rule” that was held at Yale in October of 2006. The other volumes in the series are Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics, edited by Ian Shapiro, Rogers Smith, and Tarek Masoud (Cambridge University Press, 2004); Rethinking Political Institutions: The Art of the State, edited by Ian Shapiro, Steven Skowronek, and Daniel Galvin (New York University Press, 2006); Identities, Affiliations, and Allegiances, edited by Seyla Benhabib, Ian Shapiro, and Danilo Petranovich (Cambridge University Press, 2007); Political Contingency: Studying the Unexpected, the Accidental, and the Unforeseen, edited by Ian Shapiro and Sonu Bedi (New York University Press, 2007); Divide and Deal: The Politics of Distribution in Democracies, edited by Ian Shapiro, Peter Swenson, and Daniela Donno (New York University Press, 2008); and Order, Conflict, and Violence, edited by Stathis Kalyvas, Ian Shapiro, and Tarek Masoud (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

We are pleased to record our gratitude to Yale University for the financial support that made this initiative possible. Thanks are also due to two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions, and to John Haslam of Cambridge University Press for shepherding the volume into print.

How should we reconcile the ideal that citizens in democracies aspire to control their political representatives with the reality that elected representatives have substantial leeway to act as they themselves see fit? This leeway, which is sometimes described as the monitoring problem, is often portrayed as a defect of the representative process – to be minimized if it cannot be abolished. But, as Burke's speech to the electors of Bristol suggests, this is not the only possible view of the matter.