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Abstract: Policy scorings of political actors are crucially important in operationalising rational choice models and other important theories in political science. Doing them more cheaply and quickly by computer is important for the advancement of the discipline. But we can hardly substitute these for hand-coding or even use them in new fields without being sure of their validity and reliability. We check this by comparing the mappings produced by word frequency methods with the policy series available from the work of the Manifesto Research Group/Comparative Manifesto Project (MRG/CMP). Using an aggregate calibrating/reference ‘document set’ for the time period in question evades reliability problems with pairwise comparisons and provides an authoritative text which enables individual party platforms to be scored and mapped over long time periods. Comparisons of the techniques for two countries (US and UK) are not encouraging. Wordscores in their current operationalisation flatten out party movement just as previous computerised approaches have done. Sensitivity testing with British party manifestos 1979–1997, using an expert scoring, does not reveal any improvement in performance. The reliability problems which arise with policy series are also likely to recur with cross-sectional applications of the word frequency approach. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Public policy is supposed under democracy to be necessarily linked to popular preferences through elections. Election outcomes are however shaped not only by the votes cast but also by the party-policy options on offer and the rules by which votes are aggregated into seats. A crucial question is whether rules exert their influence through the party system they help shape or whether public policy is directly affected by them. We examine these points here over the post-war period with evidence on policy preferences at electoral and governmental levels in 21 countries. Under single member constituency systems (SMD), election rules and party systems have independent and equal effects on short run representation, while under PR it is the party systems which produce (limited) distortion. Over time however SMD itself emerges as the main source of representational bias in the countries where it operates, with little bias under PR from either election or party systems. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article argues that the rise of political parties has rendered classical distinctions between direct and representative democracy largely obsolete. This is particularly true for representative democracy where, rather than selecting candidates as individuals, electors are now asked to choose between party policy packages. Party-mediated rather than unmediated policy voting is also the order of the day so far as direct democracy is concerned. The real contrast between the two thus boils down to periodic voting on medium- term party programmes versus frequent votes on individual policy. We argue here that there is a place for both in any modern democracy that truly aims at creating a necessary connection between public policy and popular preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracy is often described as a system in which a majority of electors choose one out of a number of competing parties to form a government and carry out its programme. Unfortunately, spontaneous majorities rarely form in support of one party. We generalize from a 'government' to a `median' mandate, in which the median elector chooses the pivotal party in parliament, which then translates his or her preferences into public policy. To check this we investigate how accurately parliaments and governments represent the left-right position of the median voter in each of twenty parliamentary democracies. Distortions depend on the type of electoral arrangement, being relatively smaller under proportional representation than under single-member districts. Distortions do not equate to biased representation, however. Once we consider how distortions at one step or one time are compensated by distortions in the opposite direction at another, overall representation of the median voter position is reasonably accurate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]