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Congruence between Citizens and Policymakers in Two Visions of Liberal Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

John D. Huber  and
G. Bingham Powell Jr
John D. Huber
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
G. Bingham Powell Jr
Affiliation:
University of Rochester
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Abstract

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

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , April 1994 , pp. 291 - 326
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1994

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References

1 Some of these other virtues are more fully described and elaborated in Powell, G. Bingham Jr., “Elections as Instruments of Democracy” (Manuscript, University of Rochester, 1993)Google Scholar.

2 Dahl, Robert A., Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 95Google Scholar. In a similar vein, see Pitkin, Hanna, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 234Google Scholar.

3 See Black, Duncan, “On the Rationale of Group Decision Making,” Journal of Political Economy 56 (February 1948)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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12 Huber (fn. 11).

13 See fn. 10. Most of our estimates of the positions of the median voters are taken from the Eurobarometer surveys, which use a scale that ranges from 1 to 10. We also use citizen surveys taken in Sweden, Australia, and New Zealand. We convert the scales from these surveys, as well as those from the Castles and Mair expert survey, to the 10-point scale used by the Eurobarometer. Our analysis assumes that the experts on the country used a scale whose meaning was similar to that used by citizens in that country and that the distance between scale numbers was roughly the same for the experts and citizens in all countries.

14 Miller, Warren E. and Stokes, Donald E., “Constituency Influence in Congress,” American Political Science Review 57 (March 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Achen, Christopher H., “Measuring Representation: Perils of the Correlation Coefficient,” American Journal of Political Science 21 (November 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Measuring Representation,” American Journal of Political Science 22 (May 1978)Google Scholar; Barnes (fn. 10); Converse and Pierce (fn. 10); Dalton (fn. 10); Fiorina, Morris, Representatives, Roll Calls, and Constituencies (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1974)Google Scholar; Miller, Warren E., “Majority Rule and the Representative System of Government,” in Allardt, Erik and Littunen, Yrjo, eds., Cleavages, Ideologies and Party Systems (Helsinki: Academic Bookstore, 1964)Google Scholar; and Powell, Lynda, “Issue Representation in Congress,” Journal of Politics 44 (August 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Dalton (fn. 10) also uses parties as the unit of analysis.

16 For linkage analysis confirming this point, see Converse and Pierce (fn. 10); and Barnes (fn. 10).

17 Achen (fn. 14, 1978).

18 Downs, , An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957)Google Scholar; see also Eulau, Heinz and Prewitt, Kenneth, Labyrinths of Democracy: Adaptations, Linkages, Representation and Policies in Urban Politics (New York: Bobbs-Merril, 1973)Google Scholar; Schlesinger, Joseph, Ambition and Politics: Political Careers in the United States (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966)Google Scholar; and Schumpeter, Joseph, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1942)Google Scholar.

19 See Birch, Anthony, Representation (London: Macmillan, 1972)Google Scholar; and Ranney, Austin, The Doctrine of Responsible Party Government (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962)Google Scholar.

20 See Kollman, Miller, and Page (fn. 5); and McKelvey, Richard D. and Ordeshook, Peter C., “Elections with Limited Information: A Fulfilled Expectations Model Using Contemporaneous Poll and Endorsement Data as Sources,” Journal of Economic Theory 36 (June 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 For theoretical results, see, e.g., Alesina, Alberto, “Credibility and Policy Convergence in a Two Party System with Rational Voters,” American Economic Review 78 (September 1988)Google Scholar; Coughlin, Peter J., “Candidate Uncertainty and Electoral Equilibria,” in Enelow, James M. and Hinich, Melvin J., eds., Advances in the Spatial Theory of Voting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Hinich, Melvin J., “Equilibrium in Spatial Voting: The Median Voter Result Is an Artifact,” Journal of Economic Theory 16 (December 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wittman, Donald A., “Candidates with Policy Preferences: A Dynamic Model,” Journal of Economic Theory 14 (February 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, “Spatial Strategies When Candidates Have Policy Preferences,” in Enelow and Hinich. For empirical results, see, e.g., Robertson, David, A Theory of Party Competition (London: Wiley, 1976)Google Scholar; Budge, Ian and Fairlie, Dennis, Voting and Party Competition (London: Wiley, 1983)Google Scholar; and Grofman, Bernard, Griffen, Robert, and Glazer, Amihai, “Identical Geography, Different Party: A Natural Experiment on the Magnitude of Party Differences in the U.S. Senate, 1960–84,” in Johnston, R. J., Shelley, F. M., and Taylor, P. J., eds. Developments in Electoral Geography (London: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar.

22 See Rae, Douglas, The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967)Google Scholar.

23 Lijphart, , Democracy in Plural Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; see also Lembruch, G., “A Non-Competitive Pattern of Conflict Management in Liberal Democracies,” in McRae, Kenneth, ed., Consociational Democracy (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974)Google Scholar; and Steiner, Jürg, “The Principles of Majority and Proportionality,” British Journal of Political Science 1 (January 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Lijphart, Arend, Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-one Countries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Dahl (fn. 2), chap. 11.

25 In Lijphart's empirical analysis of “consensus” systems, the number of effective parties virtually defines one of his dimensions (fn. 24), 214.

26 For an excellent review of the coalition formation literature, see Laver, Michael and Schofield, Norman, Multiparty Government: The Politics of Coalition in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), chap. 5Google Scholar.

27 Ibid., 111; de Swaan, Abram, Coalition Theory and Cabinet Government (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1973)Google Scholar; and Austen-Smith, David and Banks, Jeffrey, “Elections, Coalitions, and Legislative Outcomes,” American Political Science Review 82 (June 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 For a discussion of the Fifth Republic, see Baumgartner, Frank, “Parliament's Capacity to Expand Political Controversy in France,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 12 (March 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, Conflict and Rhetoric in French Policymaking (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Pittsburgh University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

29 See Strom, Kaare, “Minority Governments in Parliamentary Democracies: The Rationality of Nonwinning Cabinet Solutions,” Comparative Political Studies 17 (June 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, Minority Government and Majority Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

30 It would be ideal to be able to analyze congruence for this entire twenty-year span, but since the Castles and Mair expert survey measured party positions in 1982, we have used only the 1978–85 period so that we can rely on the assumption that party positions have not changed much. There are thirty-eight governments in these twelve countries in this time period. Various readers have suggested that we extend our time period and bring in more cases, but we simply cannot locate a comparable survey of experts at another time period that asks the appropriate left-right question.

31 Some readers may be troubled by the absence of electoral laws from the analysis. Clearly the electoral law of a given political system shapes many features of electoral competition and government formation that are important to this study, including the effective number of parties, proportionality, identifiability, and the election of single-party majorities. Nonetheless, for the purposes of this study, it would be difficult—if not wrongheaded—to categorize a country as either a Majority Control or Proportionate Influence system on the basis of its electoral laws. One problem is the difficulty of developing an appropriate measure of electoral laws because each one has unique features, with important differences in aggregation rules and in districting. (For example, Spain and the Netherlands both have proportional representation [PR], but the proportionality of electoral outcomes in Spain is much lower than in the Netherlands, as shown in Table 1.) More important for analysis, the nature of electoral competition varies over time within systems having the same election law. In systems with single-member district pluralities, for example, if there is a minority government at the time of an election, clarity of responsibility for past policy-making will be low. In systems with PR, to take another example, there are often cases in which identifiability is high because of the formation of preelection coalitions. As our analysis focuses on election-specific characteristics of party competition, we do not use the election laws directly to classify the various political systems. However, analysis of the indirect impact of election laws on congruence under various conditions, through the features here examined, is an interesting topic for future research.

32 The measurement of this variable was suggested by the creative work of Strom (fn. 29, 1984, 1990). Unfortunately, we cannot validate our measures with Strom's because we measure identifiability at each election, whereas Strom measures it by decade. However, an impressionistic comparison suggests very similar assessments in countries in which the levels of identifiability were relatively stable over time.

33 Powell, G. Bingham Jr., and Whitten, Guy D., “A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting: Taking Account of the Political Context,” American Journal of Political Science 37 (May 1993), 403CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Rose, Richard and Mackie, Thomas, “Incumbency in Government: Asset or Liability,” in Daalder, Hans and Mair, Peter, eds., Western Party Systems: Continuity and Change (Beverly Hills, Calif: Sage, 1983)Google Scholar; Paldam, Martin, “How Robust Is the Vote Function? A Study of Seventeen Nations over Four Decades,” in Norpoth, Helmut, Lewis-Beck, Michael, and Lafay, Jean-Dominique, eds., Economics and Politics: The Calculus of Support (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 23Google Scholar; Strom (fn. 29, 1990), 124 (on lower vote losses for minority governments); and Lewis-Beck, Michael, Economics and Elections: The Major Western Democracies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 108–9 (on lower vote losses for coalition governments)Google Scholar.

34 Powell and Whitten (fn. 33), 407. In our analysis, we have also examined a scale of the clarity of government responsibility for policy outcomes and considered separately the effects of multiple government parties and majority versus minority governments. However, the most consistent and robust effects are based on the simple distinction between incumbent single-party majority governments and all others. We have therefore used this measure in our subsequent analysis.

35 See Laasko, Markku and Taagepera, Rein, “Effective Number of Parties: A Measure with Application to Western Europe,” Comparative Political Studies 12 (April 1979)Google Scholar. Although a party choice measure that specifically considers the ideological location of each party might be more theoretically appropriate, Powell (fn. 1) shows that such measures are closely related to the effective number of parties, which is more intuitively interpretable and widely used.

36 This measure also owes a debt to Strom (fn. 29,1984, 1990), although his work has been adapted and supplemented as described in Powell and Whitten (fn. 33), 400.

37 Table 2 gives figures for both the larger time period (1968–87) and the narrower time period (1978–85). The data reassure us that system characteristics during the time period that we study below do not differ substantially from the system characteristics during the larger time period.

38 Since the left-right scales have discrete boundaries between the different cells, we approximate the location of the median voter using a technique described in Wonnacott, Thomas H. and Wonnacott, Ronald J., Introductory Statistics for Business and Economics, 3d ed. (New York: John Wiley, 1984), 671Google Scholar.

39 Browne, Eric and Franklin, Mark, “Aspects of Coalition Payoffs in European Parliamentary Democracies,” American Political Science Review 67 (June 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gamson, Peter, “A Theory of Coalition Formation,” American Sociological Review 26 (April 1961)Google Scholar; Schofield, Norman and Laver, Michael, “Bargaining Theory and Portfolio Payoffs in European Coalition Government, 1945–83,” British Journal of Political Science 15 (April 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 The mean scores by country for Government Distance I (II) are Australia 1.35 (1.35), Belgium .74 (.74), Denmark 1.36 (1.46), France 1.96 (2.15), West Germany 1.55 (1.81), Ireland .47 (.84), Italy .92 (1.24), Netherlands .90 (.50), New Zealand .95 (.95), Sweden 1.28 (1.17), Great Britain 2.39 (2.39), and Spain 1.94 (1.94).

41 In Britain the closest parties to the median voter were the Liberals in 1979 and the Alliance in 1983, but neither of these parties won as much as a quarter of the votes, and both were heavily penalized by the election laws. The Conservatives were somewhat closer to the median than was Labour, but both large parties were rather far away.

42 Our theoretical discussion does not suggest what the appropriate functional form should be, so we examined a wide variety of functional forms and a simple linear relationship turned out to be the most appropriate for each variable.

43 Our findings regarding the Proportionate Influence variables are interesting when compared with empirical studies of budget deficits by political economists; for a recent review of this literature, see Alesina, Alberto and Tabellini, Guido, “Positive and Normative Theories of Public Debt and Inflation in Historical Perspective,” European Economic Review 36 (April 1994)Google Scholar. Roubini and Sachs, for example, find that systems with a high incidence of coalition and minority governments have relatively large levels of public debt; Roubini, and Sachs, , “Political and Economic Determinants of Budget Deficits in the Industrial Democracies,” European Economic Review 33 (May 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Since the central characteristics of Proportionate Influence systems lead to coalition and minority governments, it appears that system characteristics which improve congruence between governments and citizens may also be associated with large budget deficits. We are grateful to Bill Keech for pointing this out to us.

44 See Austen-Smith, David and Banks, Jeffrey, “Stable Governments and the Allocation of Portfolios,” American Political Science Review 84 (September 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Laver, Michael and Shepsle, Kenneth A., “Coalitions and Cabinet Government,” American Political Science Review 84 (September 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 This approach is adopted from Powell, G. Bingham, “Constitutional Design and Citizen Electoral Control,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 1 (April 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 If we relax our assumption of unidimensionality, we might expect the governing parties to bargain with all the other legislative parties, increasing the weight of all the oppositions. We think that in practice some minority governments bargain only with ideologically proximate parties whereas others face a more open situation. However, our reading is that the former situation is more common and, of course, is the situation that makes the concept of congruence more interpretable.

47 The mean scores by country for Policymaker I (II) are Australia .65 (.65), Belgium .45 (.63), Denmark .57 (.64), France 1.59 (1.76), West Germany .94 (1.14), Ireland .43 (.72), Italy .49 (.63), Netherlands .51 (.19), New Zealand .73 (.73), Sweden .95 (.95), Great Britain 1.88 (1.88), and Spain 1.28 (1.28).

48 Congruence of policymakers was not greater than that of governments in every case, however. It is not a tautology. In eight of the thirty-eight cases the congruence was less for policymakers on at least one of the two measures, although the differences are usually not very large.