The terms `left' and `right' are widely used to organize party competition and to shape connections between citizens and political parties. Recent and dramatic changes in the world, however, raise important questions about the meaning and importance of left-right ideology. Most notably, the collapse of communism has led to the development of a host of new democracies. And in advanced industrial societies, conflict has emerged over issues like the environment and immigration. This paper draws on a survey of political experts in 42 societies to address three questions raised by these changes. First, is the language of left and right still widely used, even in recently democratized countries? Second, do there exist secondary dimensions of political conflict that are orthogonal to the left-right dimension? Third, and most importantly, what substantive issues define the meaning of left-right ideology? In addition to addressing these questions, we present data on the left-right locations of political parties in each of the 42 countries.

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.

A rguments about how ethnic diversity affects governance typically posit that groups differ from each other in substantively important ways and that these differences make effective governance more difficult. But existing cross-national empirical tests typically use measures of ethnolinguistic fractionalization (ELF) that have no information about substantive differences between groups. This article examines two important ways that groups differ from each other-culturally and economically-and assesses how such differences affect public goods provision. Across 46 countries, the analysis compares existing measures of cultural differences with a new measure that captures economic differences between groups: between-group inequality (BGI). We show that ELF, cultural fractionalization (CF), and BGI measure different things, and that the choice between them has an important impact on our understanding of which countries are most ethnically diverse. Furthermore, empirical tests reveal that BGI has a large, robust, and negative relationship with public goods provision, whereas CF, ELF, and overall inequality do not.

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I present a formal model of the confidence vote procedure, an institutional arrangement that permits a prime minister to attach the fate of a particular policy to a vote on government survival. The analysis indicates that confidence vote procedures make it possible for prime ministers to exercise significant control over the nature of policy outcomes, even when these procedures are not actually invoked. Neither cabinet ministers, through their authority over specific portfolios, nor members of parliament, through the use of no-confidence motions, can counteract the prime minister's policy control on the floor of parliament. The analysis also illuminates the circumstances under which prime ministers should invoke confidence vote procedures, focusing attention on the position-taking incentives of the parties that support the government, rather than on the level of policy conflict between the government and parliament.