Political representation in comparative politics

Abstract

Two large research programs have analyzed election-based connections between citizens and policy makers in different democracies. Studies of vote-seat representation in the tradition of Rae (1967) begin with citizens' party votes and have made substantial progress in elucidating the impact of election laws, geographic vote distributions, and the number of parties and their interactions on the proportionality of party representation. Studies of substantive representation in the tradition of Miller & Stokes (1963) begin with citizen issue preferences and link these to the positions of their representatives. Most studies outside the United States, confronting multimember districts and the cohesion of party representatives, have focused on voter-party dyads rather than geographic constituencies, and confirmed the importance of issues linked to a common electoral discourse and the greater structure of legislator issue positions. Recently, a number of explicitly comparative analyses have begun to analyze collective correspondence and confront other limitations of the literature.