According to the minority empowerment thesis, minority representation strengthens representational links, fosters more positive attitudes toward government, and encourages political participation. We examine this theory from a cross‐national perspective, making use of surveys that sampled minorities in the United States and New Zealand. Both countries incorporate structures into their electoral systems that make it possible for minority groups to elect representatives of their choice. We find that in both countries descriptive representation matters: it increases knowledge about and contact with representatives in the U.S. and leads to more positive evaluations of governmental responsiveness and increased electoral participation in New Zealand. These findings have broad implications for debates about minority representation.

Advocates of proportional representation (PR) often cite its potential for increasing citizen involvement in politics as one of PR's fundamental advantages over plurality or first-past-the-post systems. The assumption is that plurality electoral systems distort the translation of votes into seats, discouraging and alienating small party supporters and other political minorities. In contrast, PR systems are believed to provide greater opportunities for representation which are assumed to instil greater efficacy and increase participation. We examine this theory linking institutions to electoral participation across a diverse set of countries using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. Using a multi-level approach we find evidence consistent with the expectations about the negative influence of disproportional systems on political minorities. Voters are also likely to have stronger partisan preferences in PR systems, which enhances political efficacy and increases voter participation. The effects of PR, however, are not all positive; broad coalitions, which are likely to be a feature of these systems, reduce political efficacy.While the size of the advantage tends to vary, most of the research on electoral systems and turnout agrees that proportional representation (PR) systems have a turnout advantage. Although any one vote is unlikely to be decisive in an election, electoral systems can alter the degree to which votes can matter. Votes for minor parties in PR systems are likely to matter more in determining the overall partisan distribution of seats in a legislature than in plurality systems where minor parties often find it difficult to translate their votes into seats. Past research on electoral systems and turnout has assumed that the disproportionality between seats and votes in plurality systems instils in voters the feeling that their vote does not matter, and, as a result, they are less likely to vote. As such, attitudes towards the likely impact of one's vote are assumed to act as an intervening variable between electoral rules and electoral participation. The extant comparative literature, however, has relied almost entirely on aggregate data to examine the influence of electoral systems on voter turnout and, therefore, has never explicitly measured efficacy, the feeling that one's vote is potentially decisive. With the collection of cross-national election studies under the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), it is now possible to examine how attitudes are shaped by electoral rules and how these attitudes influence turnout. We first review the evidence regarding the relationship between electoral systems, political efficacy, strength of partisan attachments and turnout. Based on this past research, we test a model of efficacy and electoral participation that combines electoral system and individual level effects.

Recent literature has shown that the long established link between economic performance and electoral outcomes is conditioned by a country's institutions and government, what is often termed ‘clarity of responsibility’. In this article two distinct dimensions of the clarity of the political context are identified: institutional and government clarity. The first captures the formal dispersion of government power, both horizontally and vertically. The second captures the cohesion of the incumbent government. Analysing survey data from 27 European countries, it is shown that voters' ability to hold governments to account, for both the economy and management of public services, is primarily influenced by the extent to which there is an identifiable and cohesive incumbent, whereas formal institutional rules have no direct impact on performance voting.

A B S T R A C TThis article analyses the news coverage of the 2004 European parliamentary elections in all 25 member states of the European Union (EU). It provides a unique pan-European overview of the campaign coverage based on an analysis of three national newspapers and two television newscasts in the two weeks leading up to the elections. On average, the elections were more visible in the 10 new member states than in the 15 old EU member states. The political personalities and institutional actors featured in news stories about the elections were generally national political actors and not EU actors. When evaluative, the news in the old EU-15 was generally negative towards the EU, whereas in the new countries a mixed pattern was found. The findings of the study are discussed in the light of the literature on the EU's legitimacy and communication deficit. IntroductionThe 2004 European parliamentary (EP) elections were an unprecedented exercise in democracy, with more than 350 million people in 25 countries having the opportunity to vote. The elections took place only weeks after the accession of 10 new member states to the European Union -the largest enlargement ever. Most voters in both the old EU-15 and the 10 new member states experience politics primarily through the media. Particularly in the case of low-salience, second-order elections, most of what citizens know about the campaign stems from the media (Bennett and Entman, 2001; see also Eurobarometer 162). Empirical knowledge about the media's coverage of EP elections is a prerequisite for assessing the well-being of democratic processes in Europe and for informing the ongoing discussion about the EU's democratic and communication deficits.Observations of the democratic process in the EU have been dominated by the 'democratic deficit'. This deficit has been identified as one of the major shortcomings of European integration and has been conceptualized in terms of institutional design and linkage institutions that focus on national rather than EU issues (Coultrap, 1999: 108;Kuper, 1998;Scharpf, 1999). The unelected nature of the Commission, the lack of European parliamentary power in policy-making, and the dominance of national issues are reflected in a lack of popular support, legitimacy and engagement in the EU among EU citizens (e.g. Eichenberg and Dalton, 1993).The importance of the media in alleviating or contributing to the democratic deficit lies in the media's ability to contribute towards a shared framework of reference and a European identity. First, the lack of EU legitimacy is viewed as a communication deficit (Meyer, 1999;Anderson and McLeod, 2004). According to this view, EU institutions have been unsuccessful in shaping European identity and promoting the connection between citizens and EU institutions via the media (Anderson and Weymouth, 1999;Anderson, 2004). Although the EU, and the European Parliament specifically, need to promote themselves, they are oftentimes confronted with media outlets that are either sceptical or uninterested ...