Does electoral integrity yield more responsive government?
Abstract This paper investigates European party congruence with voters in left-right terms over the period of a quarter century since the late 1980s. By aggregating individual-level data collected for many countries over a long time-period to the birth-year-cohort level, and in conjunction with measures of electoral integrity created by the Electoral Integrity Project and other sources, I attempt to determine whether differences in electoral integrity correspond to differences in party responsiveness to changes in voter support and to evolutions in voter preferences. The initial version of the paper focuses on West European countries, with partial extension to post-communist countries that are members of the European Union and for which data are available as a result of successive studies of elections to the European Parliament. This is an interim report on findings to date. I hope to be able to build on this start by moving from EES data to data collected at the time of national elections in the same countries and perhaps eventually to other countries included in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems.
Mark Franklin Until he retired in 2011, Mark Franklin was the inaugural Stein Rokkan Professor of Comparative Politics at the European University Institute (EUI) and remains a director of the European Union Democracy Observatory at the EUI's Robert Schumann Center for Advanced Studies. A past Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright Scholar, he founded the Public Opinion and Participation Section of the European Union Studies Association, is a Director of the European Elections Studies project and chairs the Advisory Board of the British Election Study 2015.
Location
L. J Hume Center
Contact
- Marija Taflaga6125 2462