This bold venture into democratic theory offers a new and reinvigorating thesis for how democracy delivers on its promise of public control over public policy. In theory, popular control could be achieved through a process entirely driven by supply-side politics, with omniscient and strategic political parties converging on the median voter's policy preference at every turn. However, this would imply that there would be no distinguishable political parties (or even any reason for parties to exist) and no choice for a public to make. The more realistic view taken here portrays democracy as an ongoing series of give and take between political parties' policy supply and a mass public's policy demand. Political parties organize democratic choices as divergent policy alternatives, none of which is likely to satisfy the public's policy preferences at any one turn. While the one-off, short-run consequence of a single election often results in differences between the policies that parliaments and governments pursue and the preferences their publics hold, the authors construct theoretical arguments, employ computer simulations, and follow up with empirical analysis to show how, why, and under what conditions democratic representation reveals itself over time. Democracy, viewed as a process rather than a single electoral event, can and usually does forge strong and congruent linkages between a public and its government. This original thesis offers a challenge to democratic pessimists who would have everyone believe that neither political parties nor mass publics are up to the tasks that democracy assigns them.
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Ian Budge is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Essex. He has made major contributions both to cumulative research on democracy and to organisational developments in the discipline. His earliest research on Glasgow and Belfast focused on causes of democratic breakdown. After a period of studying elections, voting behaviour, and party competition, he turned to public policy and how it might become responsive to popular preferences - a central democratic dilemma. His research covers direct and representative democracy.
Professor Budge founded the Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis in 1968, and he was Executive Director of the European Consortium for Political Research, based at the University of Essex, between 1979 and 1983. Among his recent publications are, (with Klingemann et al), Mapping Policy Preferences: Estimates for Parties, Electorates and Governments 1945–1998 (2001), Elections, Parties, Democracy: Conferring the Median Mandate (with Michael D McDonald) (2005); The New British Politics (Ian Budge, David McKay, Kenneth Newton and John Bartle) (2007).
Michael McDonald is a Professor of Political Science at Binghamton University who is interested principally in questions about political representation. He has served as a expert witness for civil rights organizations and as an adviser to the NYS Solicitor General, county governments, and state political parties on questions of electoral rules and racial discrimination.
Paul Pennings is Associate Professor of Political Science at the VU University Amsterdam. His research and teaching interests are in the fields of Comparative (European) Politics and Comparative Methods and Statistics. He has publised widely in peer-reviewed academic journals in political science, such as Acta Politica, Electoral Studies, European Journal of Political Research, European Union Politics, Party Politics, Political Studies and Sociological Methods and Research.
Hans Keman is Professor and Chair in Comparative Political Science at the Free University of Amsterdam. He has been co-editor of the European Journal of Political Research and of Acta Politica – an international journal for political science. He has published widely on political parties and party government and policy formation – mainly regarding the Welfare State, as well as on methodology and institutional politics. Among his most recent books are Comparative Democratic Politics (2002) and Doing Research in Political Science (2006).
