Voters, parties, and declared government policy

Abstract

A perennial question for students of democracy is the extent to which government policies align with voter preferences. This is often studied by comparing median voter opinion on a left-right scale with the cabinet weighted mean, that is, the mean left-right position of cabinet parties, weighted by their legislative sizes. Government positions may also be estimated from their declarations, however. In a recent investigation, McDonald and Budge found that declared government policy better accords with the voter median than with the cabinet weighted mean, a finding they interpreted as consistent with their hypothesis that actual government policy tends to reflect a "median mandate." This investigation retests the McDonald-Budge model using a time-series cross-section methodology and an expanded data set. It finds no support for a median mandate interpretation but strong evidence that declared government positions respond to the positions of cabinet parties and, where present, external support parties. It also reveals a tendency for declared positions to be shifted to the right of the cabinet mean, a tendency that increases with the length of time that has elapsed since the last election (particularly for left-wing governments). This evidence that the policies governments set out to implement are systematically "right shifted" bears major consequences for our understanding of representative democracy. © The Author(s) 2011.