Democracy is often described as a system in which a majority of electors choose one out of a number of competing parties to form a government and carry out its programme. Unfortunately, spontaneous majorities rarely form in support of one party. We generalize from a 'government' to a 'median' mandate, in which the median elector chooses the pivotal party in parliament, which then translates his or her preferences into public policy. To check this we investigate how accurately parliaments and governments represent the left-right position of the median voter in each of twenty parliamentary democracies. Distortions depend on the type of electoral arrangement, being relatively smaller under proportional representation than under single-member districts. Distortions do not equate to biased representation, however. Once we consider how distortions at one step or one time are compensated by distortions in the opposite direction at another, overall representation of the median voter position is reasonably accurate.Conventional mandate theory, sometimes termed majoritarian democracy, sees popular preferences being translated into public policy through voters choosing as their government the party whose policies a majority prefers. Crucially, this assumes that elections do decide which party forms the government. In fact, this seldom happens.If elections do not unambiguously designate governments, what do they do? One reaction, common to both classic representational theory and modern 'visions' of 'consociational' or 'consensus' democracy, is to limit their role to endorsing representatives. These then negotiate compromises on behalf of their constituents in a more considered way than election campaigning would allow. 1 Acknowledging that there is a restricted role for elections and hence for voters in the democratic process is certainly one possible reaction to the failure of elections to designate governments unambiguously. It may even have an upside, in terms of the better policy solutions that can be reached through autonomous discussion and bargaining between parties. 2 But it is not very democratic unless there is a mechanism to ensure that the preferences of citizens are necessarily taken into account.Our purpose here is to show that, even in proportional representation (PR) systems with many parties, elections do confer a popular mandate that shapes legislative decision making. This improves the democratic credentials of consensus democracy while respecting the elite bargaining processes that reportedly produce better policy. It also gets

Using panel surveys conducted in Great Britain before and after the 1997 general election, we examine the relationship between voting behavior and post-election economic perceptions. Drawing on psychological theories of attitude formation, we argue that those who voted for Labour and the Liberal Democrats perceived the past state of the British economy under the Tory government more negatively than they had prior to casting their ballot in the 1997 election. Similarly, we posit that Labour supporters would view the future state of the national economy under Labour more positively than they had before the election. This indicates that, contrary to many assumptions in the economic voting literature, voting behavior influences evaluations of the economy as voters seek to reduce inconsistencies between their vote choice and evaluations of the economy by bringing their attitudes in line with the vote they cast in the election. It also means that voters' post-election economic perceptions are, at least in part, influenced by and thus endogenous to their vote choice. This finding has two major implications: First, cross-sectional models of economic voting are likely to overestimate the effect of economic perceptions on the vote. Second, the endogeneity of economic perceptions may compromise the quality of economic voting as a mechanism for democratic accountability.

Do democratic elections and experience with democracy affect citizens' propensity to engage in political protest? If so, how? A model of protest potential based on the incentives election winners and losers face in new and established democratic systems is presented. Using surveys conducted by the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) in seventeen democracies around the globe, the effect on political protest potential of being in the political minority or majority after an election is compared. Being in the political minority heightens citizens' political protest potential. Moreover, the effect on protest potential of losing is significantly greater in new democracies compared with established ones. These findings provide systematic evidence that election outcomes should be considered important indicators of political protest potential, and they imply that this effect is particularly salient in countries whose democratic institutions are relatively new and potentially more unstable.

We investigate the cross-time and cross-nation comparability of party left-right position measurements by expert surveys and the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP). While expert surveys show party left-right positions to be mostly static, we find the CMP records systematic party movements for one-third of the parties analyzed. On the issue of cross-national comparability, we find cross-national variation in expert surveys is muted. They contain little more than the variation associated with reputations based on party-family affiliation. The CMP measurements, on the other hand, contain variation attributable to national party-system differences. We conclude with thoughts about why all of this is so and about how one might navigate the expert survey limitations depending on the question one wants to answer about democratic politics and policy making.

Studies of criminal deterrence usually show an effect of certainty of punishment but often fail to find an effect of the severity. This is a serious threat to the theoretical underpinnings of deterrence theory. Through both a survey of 39 analyses in 33 published studies and our own reanalysis of an often‐used data set, we show the problem rests not with the theory but with the analysis of the theory. Finding no severity effect can be traced to “unbundling the theoretical package” when moving from the theory to the statistical models used to represent the theory.