We propose a new standard for evaluating the performance of electoral democracies: the correspondence between citizens’ party preferences and the party composition of governments that are formed after elections. We develop three criteria for assessing such correspondence: the proportion of citizens whose most preferred party is in government, whether the party that is most liked overall is in government, and how much more positively governing parties are rated than non-governing parties. We pay particular attention to the last criterion, which takes into account how each citizen feels about each of the parties as well as the intensity of their preferences. We find that proportional representation systems perform better on the first criterion. Majoritarian systems do better on the other two.
Research on the political preferences of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) voters shows that they are more progressive than heterosexuals. However, few studies consider differences between heterosexual, gay/lesbian, and bisexual men and women. Furthermore, little is known about how these preferences have changed as society has become more accepting of diverse sexualities. We offer an analysis of Canadian LGB voters’ political preferences a decade and a half after same-sex marriage was legalized. Consistent with prior research, we find that gay men, and, to a lesser extent, bisexual men, are more left-wing than heterosexual men. A more novel finding is that bisexual women are the most left-wing group. Lesbian women are only slightly to the left of heterosexual women. While left-wing bisexual women are growing in number, the overall gap between LGB and heterosexual voters has remained stable across generations, because marriage narrows some of the preference gaps.
Scholars have long studied the influence of parties on citizens’ policy preferences. Experiments conducted outside Canada have convincingly shown that the cues offered by political parties can influence people’s attitudes. However, the most prominent study of party cue effects in Canada finds weak effects, concluding that Canadian parties are less influential because they are less clearly ideological than parties elsewhere. We propose that parties are actually more influential than they appear because party cue effects partly depend on variables other than partisanship, notably attitudes toward the cue-giver. This is especially true in countries like Canada with multi-party systems. We show that attitudes toward parties are not clearly reflected in partisanship in Canada. We then show that more specific measures of party and leader attitudes better account for how experimental participants react to cues than does party identification alone.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.