Who Gets Heard in Plenary Debates? Median Voter Versus Median Party Supporter

• In Event: The Comparative Politics of Ideology and Social Support

Abstract

Many discussions – public and scientific – focus on the trustworthiness of political parties as representatives of the citizens. Media articles discuss disenchantment with politics and citizens complain about parties not fulfilling their promises and acting as they please when elected into office. In scientific debates, representation has also been a topic of considerable discussion for a long time, both in theoretical as well as in empirical research. Interestingly, empirical studies on the quality of representation often do not arrive at such a negative assessment, with regard to, first, preference congruence between voters and parties, second, congruence between parties' pre-electoral positions and the policy output, and third, with regard to pledge fulfilment. A possible reason for this disparity has to do with different expectations about what good representation entails: whether the median or the party mandate is emphasized. Proportional systems are normally more strongly associated with the idea of a party mandate, in which parties should ensure that the different preferences held by the electorate are represented in parliament. Powell also demonstrates that these systems lead to good median voter representation through government formation processes. However, if government formation does pull coalition parties towards the median voter, this also pulls parties away from their party mandate. How likely party voters are to except these compromises might be connected to the question of when these compromises are made during the representation process. Do parties still publicly articulate their voters’ preferences in parliament before reaching compromises, or does convergence toward the median voter take place at such an early stage that the representational relationship between parties and their party voters is harmed? I have created a new data set that contains party positions from both the pre-electoral and the parliamentary arena over six legislative terms in Germany. The positions have been estimated from election manifestos and plenary debates using automated content analysis. This new data set allows for a comparison of party positions in these two different arenas and enables investigation into the reasons why and how parties diverge from their pre-electoral positions once they have been elected into parliament. The data shows that both government and opposition parties already converge towards the median voter position in plenary debates. While this position change secures a good representation of the whole electorate, it reduces the likelihood that different preferences held in the electorate are heard in parliament, one of the main goals of proportional representation.

Author

• Pola Lehmann, Berlin Social Science Center