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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]

Political parties in the United States are usually regarded as too weak and decentralized, too much the prey of office-seeking politicians and special interests, to function effectively as programmatic, policy-effecting agents within the separation of powers. This has been taken as a serious flaw in the U.S. version of representative democracy, prompting cycles of proposed reform; criticisms of the existing set-up as a capitalistic sham; or alternative justifications of the system as pluralist rather than strictly party democracy. Our research challenges these assumptions by demonstrating the existence of strong links between postwar (1948-1985) election platforms and governmental outputs. Platforms' sentences, coded into one of 54 subject categories, are used as indicators of programmatic emphases and are related to corresponding federal expenditure shares. Resulting regression models demonstrate the full applicability of party mandate theory to the United States, and they operationalize its U.S. variants concretely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]