Executive Selection and Political Knowledge in Advanced Democracies.

In this paper, I demonstrate that citizens in different democracies differ markedly in the extent to which they can successfully order parties on a left-right scale. Further, I show that this variance is not explained by any of the differences across countries that one might initially suppose explain the difference (e.g., the salience of the left-right dimension of politics, the complexity of the party system, levels of education or political interest, etc.) Instead, I propose a theory which suggests that these differences occur because of the very different ways in which executives get selected in different parliamentary democracies. I test the theory with data on over 100 voter surveys conducted in 21 democracies over the last two decades. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]