When Does a Vote-Winner's Ideological Position Determine Government Congruence?

• In Event: Representational and Distributional Consequences of Electoral Systems (Virtual)

Abstract

In most parliamentary elections in developed democracies no party wins a majority of the votes. In 100 parliamentary elections in 19 countries between 1996 and 2019 a single party never won as much as 50% of the vote. After the votes were cast, further stages of vote-seat transformation and/or inter-party bargaining were necessary to find the legislative majority needed to elect and sustain a parliamentary government. Sometimes pre-election coalition commitments also played a role.

Every election produces a plurality vote winner. In these 100 elections the plurality winner had won between 20.4% and 47.3% of the vote (average of 34%.) Usually, these vote winners did end up in the government (88/100) and they usually gained the most important single position in that government, the prime ministership, and more cabinet portfolios than any other single party. Some analysts have considered them as a major link between citizens’ preferences and government policy. Yet, there are surprising gaps in our understanding of these largest voted parties, their relationships to the electorate, the consequences of their (relative) victories. Their ideological position was only one factor in shaping the ideological position of the government, often not its most important determinant.

This paper examines other characteristics of those vote-winners, analyzing how these features shape the connection to the position of the government, and beyond that, its congruence with the position of the median citizen, a benchmark of good ideological representation. How large was the plurality vote winner? Did it become the largest legislative party? What role was played by the election rules? What was its ideological position—was it also the median voted party or was it distant from that party? And how did its popularity compare with that of other parties? Was it strictly more popular than every other party—technically a “Condorcet winner”? As we shall see, although every election produces a plurality winner, only about half of those plurality vote winners were Condorcet winners. How much do each of these other properties matter in the connection between a party’s winning the most votes and turning its ideological commitments into parliamentary governmental policy?

Some of these connections have been analyzed, in a somewhat smaller set of elections, in Powell 2019. Those analyses showed the importance of also holding the median legislative position in shaping the government’s ideology. When there are separate median and plurality parties in the legislature, it is the median party’s position that has the greater average influence on the government’s position. But the role of relative party popularity in shaping the government’s ideology has not been explicitly considered. Thanks to the work of Kalandrakis and Desei 2021 we can estimate whether (and why) these plurality vote winners are core parties and Condorcet winning parties. This paper explores whether and when this relative popularity increases the probable influence of their ideological position on the position of the government--and its congruence with the citizens.

Author

• G. Bingham Powell, University of Rochester