Elite Responsiveness to Voters

Abstract

There is a variety of research in political science which focus on the quality of representative democracy. Those are for example research on electoral behaviour, political support, responsiveness and accountability of the authorities, policy outputs, corruption, party competition and party politics. The basic idea of democracy is the ‘rule of the people’. In modern societies democracy is implemented as a representative democracy, for example with free and fair elections, and modern democracies are based in certain principles such as the rule of law and that certain citizens have certain right. Thus a modern democracy is multi-layered in the sense that its’ implementation is in the hands pf various agents (e.g. voters and political parties) and institutions, which all play an influential role in how it is carried out and have an impact on the quality of the outputs of modern democracies. In general research on representative democracy focuses on only one side of representative democracy, such as on citizens, the political elite or political institutions. and our knowledge about the links there between is limited. In this panel we discuss papers which are about the links, dynamic or else, between the different agents/components of representative democracy. The papers which are part of this panel discuss important topics, such as ideological congruence between political parties and voters, whether and how descriptive representation impacts congruence, the link between issue-congruence and policy outputs, the perceptions’ of democracy, of voters and political elites, together with changes in the party system.