TWO ‘VISIONS’, ONE DEMOCRACY: DO
‘MAJORITARIANISM’ AND ‘PROPORTIONALITY’
SIMULTANEOUSLY GUIDE DEMOCRATIC
POLICY-MAKING?
Ian Budge*
University of Essex
Colchester, UK
Email: budgi@essex.ac.uk
*corresponding author
Michael D. McDonald
Binghamton University SUNY
Binghamton, NY, USA
mdmcd@binghamton.edu
2
TWO ‘VISIONS’, ONE DEMOCRACY: DO ‘MAJORITARIANISM’
AND ‘PROPORTIONALITY’ SIMULTANEOUSLY GUIDE
DEMOCRATIC POLICY-MAKING?
ABSTRACT
Democracy is supposed to effect the popular will. But is this best expressed by the party
with the largest vote or by compromise among all parties? Median-sensitive ‘proportionality’
as opposed to plurality-based ‘majoritarianism’ has been seen as distinguishing ‘proportional
democracies’ from ‘majoritarian democracies’. Both however have representational claims
which can be made within any one democracy. Dilemmas about which ‘vision’ to follow are
in practice eased by joint participation of plurality and median parties in government – but
even more by their policy preferences generally pointing in the same direction anyway,
facilitating a common response in terms of government policy. This article examines policy
relationships between plurality parties, median parties and governments inside 16 post-war
democracies, uncovering practical bases for accommodation between ‘majoritarian’ and
‘proportional’ visions.
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TWO ‘VISIONS’, ONE DEMOCRACY: DO ‘MAJORITARIANISM’ AND
‘PROPORTIONALITY’ SIMULTANEOUSLY GUIDE DEMOCRATIC
POLICY-MAKING?
THE POPULAR WILL: MAJORITARIAN, PROPORTIONAL – OR BOTH?
Classical political theorists assumed that the popular will emerges unproblematically
from general discussion and voting (Schattschneider, 1942, 14). The actual failure of
elections to produce clear majorities has long been known – less than 10 per cent do
(McDonald & Budge, 2005, 22-3). However, it took Bingham Powell’s seminal exploration of
‘Elections as Instruments of Democracy’ (2000), to focus scholarly attention on the
consequences of such failure..
These lead in most democracies to manufacturing the missing majority through
election rules which give the plurality party (with the largest individual vote) a majority of
Parliamentary seats: or to creating a majority through legislative negotiations between
potential coalition partners which will then form a government. These procedures were put
on an equal footing in Powell’s ‘two visions of democracy’. Election systems which habitually
produced a clear mandate for one party were characterized as ‘majoritarian democracies’
and multi-party systems with coalition governments as ‘proportional democracies’. While the
first had obvious advantages of coherence and accountability, proportional democracies – in
line with Lijphart’s (1968, 1984, 1999) arguments for consensus and negotiation – produced
greater policy congruence between citizens and governments.
Powell (2000, 77-81) notes that single party governments usually rest on plurality
votes rather than genuine electoral majorities. The government majority is purely legislative,
created by the tendency of single member constituency systems with plurality winners
(SMDP) to translate a popular plurality into a legislative majority. However, the ready
identifiability of the plurality winner and the mandate conferred by plurality status justify the
procedure. Where no party is clearly identified by the election as the leading contender,
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coalition negotiations and policy compromises are necessary to produce a government.
This, as a matter of fact, often takes policy stands closer to those of the median citizen than
does a plurality-based one (Powell, 2000, 221-2). What emerges are two distinct types of
modern democracy which work in different ways and produce rather different results.
McDonald et al (2004) seek to bridge this gap by presenting a unified account of
democracy at work in their theory of the median mandate (see also McDonald & Budge,
2005). Their argument is that elections can be seen as expressing a majority preference
indicated by the position of the median voter. All democracies, in order to qualify as such,
have to make ‘a necessary connection between acts of governance and the equally weighted
felt interests of citizens with respect to these acts’ (May, 1978: Saward, 1998, 51). Thus
‘majoritarian’ as well as ‘proportional’ democracies ought to bring government policy as close
as possible to the median voters preference and can all be assessed on their ability to do so.
On this comparison, proportional systems perform better than majoritarian or plurality ones
(confirming Powell, 2000, 221-2 – who however did not so explicitly set up conformity to the
median preference as a general standard).
The median mandate approach has a consistent logic behind it, which given its
premises seem to provide both the desired unified approach to democracy and a rationale for
Lijphart’s advocacy of ‘consensus democracy’ - and incidentally for Powell’s findings in
favour of proportional democracy. The premises the median mandate thesis rests on are
however very strong and probably unrealistic. In particular it assumes that all voters decide
between parties on policy grounds. This surely flies in the face of evidence from voting
studies from all over the world in the tradition of The American Voter (Campbell et al, 1960).
Even if we learned nothing else from these, they conclusively demonstrate that party
attachments, government competence, candidate appeals and many situational factors apart
from issues have a strong – even major – influence on the popular vote.
If we allow for an electorate that votes with mixed motives, not just in terms of policy
(or even more narrowly, in terms of policy proximity) we have got to step back towards
Powell’s position and reconsider the conflicting claims of the plurality voter and the median
5
voter to represent majority opinion. We are not going back entirely to Powell however as
recent evidence suggests that both plurality-based majoritarianism and proportionality can be
seen as entering into electoral and governmental processes in all democracies, not just as
distinguishing one type of democracy from another.
This evidence comes from a series of studies (Wlezien, 1996: Wlezien & Soroka,
2009: Soroka & Wlezien, 2004: 2005) of the ‘majoritarian’ democracies of Britain, Canada
and the US, which show government policy initiatives as extremely sensitive to movements
of public opinion. Such movements are often based on an adverse reaction of electors to the
proposed policies themselves, which the government then modifies to improve its standing in
the next election. The Macro Polity (Erikson, MacKuen & Stimson, 2002, 282-326) also sees
these ‘thermostatic’ interplays as being at work between US elections.
If plurality parties in these ‘majoritarian’ democracies habitually accommodate public
opinion (representing in part the other parties’ policy preferences) then clearly some kind of
‘proportional’ negotiation and compromise with other political groupings is taking place. The
US of course is well known for the continuing negotiations and policy compromises which the
division of powers forces on all parties. Canada has frequent minority governments whose
survival depends on effective compromise. Wlezien & Soroka’s evidence demonstrates
however that even Britain’s ‘elective dictatorship’ cannot simply steamroll its policies through
and has to take opposition into account.
This is hardly surprising – even elective dictatorships have to concern themselves
with votes in the next election. But the findings indicate that ‘majoritarianism’ can and does
co-exist with ‘proportionality’, rather than substituting for it as an exclusive form of decisionmaking in one democracy as opposed to another. On the other side evidence from
proportional systems indicates that plurality status gives parties considerable advantages
over the others they negotiate with in the formation of coalition governments (Muller & Strøm,
2000), share of cabinet seats (Browne & Franklin, 1973) and policy-making (see below).
Quite apart from the detailed evidence one can recognise generally that in the
absence of an electoral majority, both the largest party and all the parties have claims to
6
represent the popular will. In the absence of any clear criterion to decide between their
claims, surely most democracies have to try to accommodate both, at any rate to some
extent. Below we check comparative evidence to see to what extent they can be, and are,
mutually accommodated. First however we have to consider how to identify the carriers of
the majoritarian and proportional ‘visions’ in practice. We argue below that the plurality party
is the one with the commanding numerical basis whether in a multi-party legislature or in one
where SMDP gives it the majority of seats. It thus represents the concept of majoritarianism
in democratic decision-making. The median party position is the one that would probably be
arrived at by all-party negotiation and compromise. It thus embodies the concept of
proportionality.
OPERATIONALISING MAJORITARIANISM AND PROPORTIONALITY: PLURALITIES AND
MEDIANS.
Since Downs (1957) and Black (1948, 1958) independently demonstrated the ‘Power
of the Median’, the median position on a one-dimensional policy continuum (usually the
overarching Left-Right dimension) has generally been taken to represent the popular
preference (cf Powell, 2000, 175-229: Adams et al 2004: Ezrow, 2005). From Figure 1 it is
easy to see why. If all actors prefer positions closer to their own
[FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE]
to ones further away they will not leapfrog to form majority coalitions with actors on the other
extreme (A with G for example). A would always prefer to be in the majority ABCDE.
Similarly G would always prefer the combination GFE to any other majority. These
preferences make E, at the median, crucial in deciding which majority will form, as it is
essential to both. E is also assumed to be policy-motivated so will favour the majority which
adopts the policy position closest to its own. Successive bargaining rounds will thus end up
with a majority position close to that of the median. Hence the median position is the one
which proportional bargaining and negotiation between all parties will produce as the majority
preference.
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The logic is very strong – if the assumptions on which it is based are appropriate.
That is to say, it will only hold if all the actors are purely policy-motivated and if they array all
their policy-preferences along a one-dimensional continuum, as shown in Figure 1. In
practice the only cleavage which could sustain such an overarching policy continuum is LeftRight.
Figure 1 probably gives a good picture of the way legislative voting proceeds if we
take the percentage distribution as referring to shares of Parliamentary seats. Parties do
seem to divide along Left-Right lines and favour positions closer to their own (Axelrod, 1970
165-85: Budge et al 2001, 20-45). Even at legislative level however other considerations
may enter. Where policies far removed from Left-Right concerns are voted on separately
they may produce a different ordering of the parties. Moreover a legislature may have nonpolicy-based concerns about having stable and effective government in the face of external
threats and crises which would favour having a large plurality party as its basis. The Nordic
countries are a good case in point where the social democrats have often been favoured in
government formation through being the single largest party.
Even in a multi-party legislative situation therefore considerations other than LeftRight policy positions may surface, favouring a large plurality party over the Left-Right
median position. This is even truer and more relevant at electoral level when we take the
percentage distribution in Figure 1 as referring to election votes. General Elections put
voters in the position of having to express both policy preferences and choose a government
at the same time. Some votes therefore will inevitably be cast on non-policy based
considerations – which may even sway a majority of voters. When the dominant concern
can often be government effectiveness, stability, and clear accountability, there is then
considerable justification for the tendency of the SMDP rules to translate a popular plurality
into a majority of legislative seats.
Even when we try to evaluatet the vote distribution in pure policy terms, the seeming
median party which emerges from it may not actually be at the genuine median policy
position. This discrepancy would occur if any vote was affected by non-policy
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considerations. In that case discounting non-policy votes could lead to the seeming median
being displaced to Left or Right. Given uncertainty about the median’s true position, voters
for the plurality party might well claim to bestow a more convincing policy mandate by
arguing that their votes had more policy content than the others.
However, the median position cannot be totally written off as uninformative, even
where the legislative majority goes to the plurality party. The distribution of votes emerging
from the General Election is the most authoritative expression of overall policy preferences
that we have, even if we have some doubts about it. Under the declared distribution of
preferences the revealed median is the only one common to all vote-based majorities. The
median position therefore is the one such majorities would tend to endorse after any process
of negotiation. This means that the median position emanates from the preferences of all
electors, not just from one (perhaps extreme) group, as might be the case with the plurality
position. This is particularly true as it is the declared preference which is closest in
aggregate to all declared individual preferences and thus minimizes dissatisfaction if
adopted.
These considerations all lend the median position some standing even where SMDP
rules give the popular plurality the legislative majority. Arguments about the popular majority
basis of the median and the plurality positions can go on endlessly however as we lack the
crucial information about what mix of motivation went into the votes and whether therefore
the median is the ‘real’ policy median or the plurality party is the ‘real’ policy majority. Their
contrasting claims are summarized in Table 1.
[Table 1 about here]
What the Table makes clear is that neither the median nor the plurality positions can
be decisively dismissed as carriers of the popular majority preference under representative
democracy. The median position is the one that would probably be arrived at by party
negotiation and compromise and thus operationalizes the concept of ‘proportionality’ in
democratic decision-making. The plurality position is the one with a commanding numerical
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basis whether in a multi-party legislature or in one where SMDP gives it the majority of seats.
It thus represents the concept of majoritarianism in democratic decision-making. Does this –
given the claims of median-based proportionality – always prevail however, even in
democracies we would regard as generally majoritarian? And does plurality-based
majoritarianism always lose its force even where decision-making is more proportional? (in
practice under coalition Governments under PR with multi-parties). Now that we have
investigated the general claims for representing the popular majority that can be made on
both sides we can examine actual democratic practices empirically and comparatively, by
seeing how government formation and policy-making respond to ‘proportional’ median and
‘majoritarian’ plurality preferences in 16 post-war democracies.
GOVERNMENT FORMATION AND COMPOSITION
We take our information about government composition from Woldendorp, Keman
and Budge (2000) and use the vote distributions reported in Volkens, Schnapp & Lass (1992)
with updates to 1995, our end year, from the specialist reports in the European Journal of
Political Research. To characterize the party supported by the median voter we additionally
rely on the Comparative Manifesto Project’s (CMP) Left-Right scorings of parties in the 16
democracies for each post-war election 1945-1995 (Budge et al, 2001, 19-46). Details of
how the Left-Right scale has been constructed are given below when we come to analyse
party policy positions more directly. Here we concentrate on government formation as such,
against the background of the election results and the declared preferences of electors for
the parties’ overarching positions on the left-right scale.
Table 2 reports the relative and absolute frequencies of being in government
[Table 2 about here]
or not, for the plurality and median electoral parties, for the first governments forming
immediately after each of 215 elections – covering sixteen nations from the early 1950s
through 1995 (not including France’s government after its unique PR election, in 1986). The
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fourfold classification shows whether the median electoral party, 1 the plurality electoral party,
both, or neither are in government. The top cross-classification covers all nations; the two
tables underneath separate out elections conducted under SMDP rules (N = 81) from those
conducted under PR (N = 135).2
The main message of the sixteen-nation cross-classification is that the plurality party
holds a privileged position. It is included in about four out of five governments. The party
closest to the median voter (i.e., the electoral median party) holds office in just under twothirds of these first governments after an election3 and most of those cases are situations
when the plurality party is also in government – 122 out of 140 cases. Going one step
further, of these 122 cases, ninety five are situations when one party is both the plurality and
median. The conjunction of median voter and plurality voter endorsement all but guarantees
inclusion in government. All ninety-five times it occurs, the party is in office. But, when one
but not the other is included, the plurality party is three times more likely than the electoral
median party to be there.
The cross-classifications for SMDP and PR systems are remarkably similar. The
marginal relative frequencies are virtually the same – including the median party in about
65% of governments while including the plurality party in about 85% of governments under
SMDP and 79% under PR (not a statistically significant difference). A more notable
difference comes from PR systems’ slightly greater tendency to include the median party in a
government when it does not also include the plurality party. By implication, these
governments display a slightly lesser tendency to include the plurality party, and a slightly
lesser tendency to include both the median and plurality. This difference, we suppose,
1
A median electoral party is the party with a Left-Right score closest to the position of the median
voter. This may or may not be the same as the median parliamentary party as such. For the
calculation of the Left-Right score see below.
2
Elections in six nations are classified as SMDP: Australia, Canada, France Fifth Republic
(excluding 1986), New Zealand (its post-1995 mixed-PR elections are not in the data set), the
United Kingdom, and the United States (presidential elections).
3
The two-thirds fraction is lower than the three-fourths reported in Müller and Strøm, (2000, 564).
Part of the difference relates to the fact that we are dealing with the median electoral party and not
the median parliamentary party; part relates to coverage of different nations; and part, in
comparison to Müller and Strøm, relates to Left-Right party locations based on expert survey data
versus the MRG-CMP data used here.
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comes from SMDP elections encouraging voting that attaches the median and plurality
designation to the same party – 58% of elections under SMDPs (with Britain and France the
notable exceptions) versus 36% of elections under PR.4
Going back to our general concerns, the main point that emerges from comparing
government participation is surely the absence of any real difference between proportional
and majoritarian (SMDP) systems in privileging the plurality over median as the expression of
majority support. Certainly there remains a difference between the systems - which we
investigate below for its policy effects – in terms of whether the plurality party is the leading
or the only member of the government. In terms of the policy centrality accorded to the
median and plurality parties there does however seem little difference in democratic practice
across the board. All democracies seem ‘majoritarian’ rather than ‘proportional’ in emphasis,
so far as government formation and confrontation are concerned.
DOES PLURALITY VS MEDIAN ENDORSEMENT MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN POLICY
TERMS?
Features of government beyond the inclusion of particular types of parties are
important to governing positions. Perhaps, for example, the electoral plurality party tends
more often to go it alone in government, whereas the electoral median party tends to join in a
coalition. If so, the electoral plurality party would have more weight in policy-making than the
numbers on its presence or absence indicate by themselves. Alternatively, when the plurality
and median parties are not one and the same, they may take similar policy positions, and
thus a seemingly clear-cut distinction in terms of relative government participation is not
vastly important in terms of the policy being adopted.
In addition to taking account of party characteristics, the fact that median and plurality
voter positions are correlated has to be considered. The correlation is not a necessary
(definitional) matter. But logic tells us that it is likely to emerge empirically. On the ‘not
4
There is a tendency for the plurality voter party to gain advantage from having a vote
percentage approaching 50 and for the median to gain an advantage from a close vote split
between the two largest parties. We do not pursue more detailed analyses of those tendencies, as
such pursuit is more likely to cloud than to make clear the main message that a plurality voter’s
preferred party is relatively privileged in comparison to a median voter’s preferred party.
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necessarily so’ side of various possibilities, imagine a right-leaning party at the next election.
Imagine also, because its vote splits with another right wing party, that the right-leaning party
loses its plurality status to a party on the left. This combination of changes has the median
voter moving rightward (the Right vote increases in total) while the plurality party moves
leftward. On the correlated side of the possibilities, however, imagine that a right-leaning
party in a two-party system loses one election by a 45-55 voter percentage split and wins the
next election by a 54-46 split. The median voter moves to the Right between these elections
and so does the plurality voter. As party systems generally remain stable between
successive elections we suspect that the correlated movements predominate. But this needs
further investigation. One clear relationship does emerge however. If support for the party
alternatives remains broadly the same from election to election, a marginal shift in the
plurality voter position will go in the same direction as a shift in the median position.
We examine the practical possibilities for co-ordinated movement between the two in
policy terms, using a Left-Right measure. We are not bound to the idea that all of policy is
necessarily contained in the Left-Right distinction. However, for a comparative analysis such
as this it is the one type of conflict which crops up in all countries and time periods, rendering
it possible to place all parties, wherever located, within the same policy framework (Budge,
Robertson & Hearl eds, 1987: Huber & Inglehart, 1995: Klingemann et al, 2006).
Possibly because of the universality of the Left-Right cleavage, there is the further
constraint on our investigation that the only measure on which one can trace party policy
movement over time, in a number of countries, is the Left-Right scale devised by the
Manifesto Research Group/Comparative Manifestos Project (MRG-CMP) (Klingemann et al,
2006, 5-9). This has the additional advantage of drawing on all the policy information
contained in the parties’ authoritative statements of election policy, as specified below.
13
The CMP has coded each quasi-sentence5 of the election programs of significant
parties in over 50 countries for the post-war period into one of 56 categories covering the full
range of public policy. The overall distribution resulting from this is converted into
percentages to control for varying length of the text. The main resulting policy measure is a
Left-Right scale which groups 13 of the original categories to the Right and 13 to the Left, on
largely a priori grounds. Percentaged references to ‘Left’ topics are summed and subtracted
from the summed percentages of ‘Right’ topics. This gives a scale running in theory from
-100 (totally Left) to +100 (totally Right). In practice parties rarely move beyond ±50.
Essentially the Left-Right scale contrasts support for order and security at home and
abroad; traditional morality; and ‘freedom’ on the Right, to support for government planning
and intervention; welfare and social security; and peaceful internationalism, on the Left. It
thus gives an overall summary of policy stances across the whole of the party platform in
each election year.6 So we feel that the analyses below do give a pretty comprehensive
picture of policy in the countries concerned.
Figures 2 and 3 trace median and plurality voter positions in each of 16 nation’s
elections from 1950 through 1995, with Figure 2 displaying the traces for ten PR nations and
Figure 3 displaying the traces for the six SMDP nations. Table 3 reports a set of summary
statistics, by nation, to help describe the details.
[Figure 2 about here]
[Figure 3 about here]
[Table 3 about here]
5
A quasi-sentence can be either a grammatical sentence or ‘an argument or phrase which is the
verbal expression of one idea or meaning. It is often marked off in a text by commas or (semi)colons. Long sentences may contain more than one argument so that they need to be broken up
into quasi-sentences’ Klingemann et al (2006) xxiii
6
Incidentally the median elector position we used to identify the electoral median party above,
also derives from combining information about party positions on the Left-Right scale with their
vote as suggested by Kim & Fording (1998, 2001) and reported in Budge et al (2001, 160-6). We
have modified the calculation slightly by assuming that the distribution of votes for parties at each
end of the array is symmetrical rather than running right out to the end of the continuum. But this
produces a substantive difference in estimates only in the US case.
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But for France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, the median and plurality positions
trace one another reliably enough to record a statistically significant positive relationship.
Generally the median voter’s position is more centrist and less volatile than the plurality
voter’s. This centrism is reflected in the graphs inasmuch as median voter scores tend to
stay closer to zero than the plurality voter scores; the lower volatility is apparent from the
smoother traces for the median voter with the exceptions of Denmark and Norway. This
centrism and lower volatility are also reflected in the statistical summaries, by the slope
values exceeding 1.0; a one-unit movement by the median voter is associated with more
than a one-unit movement by the plurality voter.
The trace of the Austrian plurality voter shows oversteering relative to the median
position in the 1950s and to the early 1960s, and then the two traces mostly move in tandem.
Tandem movements are also visible in other PR systems except for Switzerland throughout
and except for one or two large deviations during the 1970s or 1980s in Belgium, Germany,
Ireland, Italy, and the Netherlands. Other than Switzerland, the most remarkable
mismatches among PR nations are in Denmark and Norway, where the plurality social
democratic parties (the Danish Social Democratic Party, SD, and the Norwegian Labour
Party, DN) stood almost persistently to the left of the median voter position. This creates the
leftward bias of the plurality voter to the left of the median voter as indicated in Table 3 by the
statistically significant negative intercepts. The other noticeable but less remarkable
mismatches are the rightward bias in Germany and the leftward bias in the Netherlands.
These, unlike Denmark and Norway, are nations where once-in-a-while large deviations tend
to go just one way. Finally, in regard to PR nations, the Swiss median and plurality voter
positions are consistently out of step. From the 1950s through 1980 the Swiss median voter
drifted gradually leftward and the plurality voter, a supporter of the SPS/PSS, stood farther
Left. Then from 1983 through 1991, while the median voter positions continued their gradual
leftward drift, the Swiss liberals, FDP//PRD, took the plurality spot. All of this happened while
three of the four major Swiss parties – Social Democrats, Liberals, and Christians
(CVP/PDC) – vied in close competition for the plurality position, each with a vote typically in
15
the 20 and 25% range. Close competition among the major left and right parties in the
presence of a centrist alternative (in Switzerland, the CVP/PCD) are circumstances where
reading a majority electoral position from the median versus the plurality can be, and as we
are reporting for Switzerland sometimes is, likely to be very different. In addition to the
consistent mismatch in Switzerland, close competition between Left and Right parties and a
centrist alternative also contributes to the occasional mismatches in Germany, the
Netherlands, and Belgium.
Mismatches aside, though they are potentially a problem, the relationships between
the voter positions, other than in Switzerland, are not statistically significantly different from
one-to-one among PR nations. In nine out of ten PR nations, slopes are a little higher or a
little lower than 1.0, and with fairly large standard errors. Generalizing, the matches through
time wander about in a not terribly reliable but general pattern not too much out of line with
one another.
The generalization holds reasonably well for SMDP nations, too, with the exception of
France. The slopes are roughly in the neighborhood of 1.0 - even less reliable than PR
nation slopes. In the United States we see persistent oversteering of the plurality relative to
median positions and almost as much in the United Kingdom. From the oversteering come
relatively large slopes (Table 3, b > 1.4). For Australia and New Zealand, we see loosely
consistent tracking of the median positions by the plurality positions. In Canada, especially
through 1979, we see mostly consistent tracking.
France is a different case. It shows no relationship between the median and plurality
positions to speak of. It is similar in this to Switzerland, except that the median voter position
does not show such a consistent leftward drift. As in Switzerland, however, a major party on
the right (Gaullists and their progeny) was the plurality winner of middling size from the start
of the Fifth Republic until 1980, after which the major opposition party, the Socialists, PS,
emerged as the middling size plurality winner – (the vote percentages refer to the first ballot).
And, just as PS fortunes rose, the median voter moved rightward. In the series of elections
16
of the Fifth Republic, through 1993, all of this produces essentially no relationship between
electoral median and plurality positions.
Usually the median and plurality voter positions give correlated readings of which
direction, Left versus Right, an electorate signals the parliament and government to go. In a
few cases – Switzerland and France throughout, along with Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Italy,
and the Netherlands once in a while – movements of the plurality and median voter positions
give very different readings.7 When this is the case, the elections give ambiguous messages
about whether it is plausible to consider the median or plurality voter position as carrying the
electoral majority preference. The ambiguity arises most seriously when two parties are in
close competition for a plurality vote e.g. the German case, where two parties generally
receive vote percentages above 40 and a small party (vote <10%) is at the electoral median.
Here it is arguable which large party to empower. Thus it is reasonable to think about
empowering either or both. An alternative which tempers this choice is to hand over power
to the median party or to include the median party in government along with one of the large
parties. All of these post-election responses have emerged in Germany, and all are
reasonable and ‘democratic’, accommodating both ‘majoritarian’ and ‘proportional’
responses. When the close competitors for the plurality spot receive middling size vote
shares, it also makes sense, arguably, to empower the median position, alone or in addition
to the plurality position, as in Belgium and the Netherlands.
Government participation is one thing but what government decides to do is not
wholly determined by this especially under coalitions. Our next step in the analysis asks
what government policy positions emerge from the election results.
WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES PLURALITY OR MEDIAN ENDORSEMENT MAKE TO
GOVERNMENT POLICY?
7
In Switzerland this may not matter too much given that the federal government is formed by a
permanent coalition of the four large parties and much policy is delegated to cantons. Frequent
referendums and initiatives also supplement the policy messages given by general elections.
17
Democracies tend to privilege the electoral plurality over the median in forming
governments. Reading electoral majorities in terms of forming around the median or plurality
electoral party shows a loose but consistent relationship between the policy directions they
point towards in most countries most of the time. In countries where the loose connection
breaks down for a short series of elections (Belgium, Germany, Ireland, and Italy) and in two
where the relationship breaks down completely (Switzerland and France, and perhaps three,
if we include the Netherlands) governments usually form as coalitions. Coalitions hold the
potential of splitting a difference and thereby saving the balance of representation. With that
possibility in mind, we put our government and voter findings together and enquire whether
government policy positions follow the direction indicated by either the median or plurality
voter.
Perhaps the strongest empirical generalization in political science is that
parliamentary seat proportions among parties in government relate very closely to the
proportion of cabinet portfolios held by the parties (Browne and Franklin 1973; see Warwick
and Druckman 2006 for a recent review). With Kim and Fording (2002) we rely on this oftrepeated finding to score government policy positions, Left-Right, as seat-weighted policy
positions of parties in government. Thus, when two parties are in government, one with 25
seats and scoring 0 on the Left-Right metric and the other with 75 seats and scoring +20 on
the Left-Right metric, the government’s position is +15 (i.e., 25*0 + .75*20). And, when a
plurality party holds all the cabinet portfolios, as it often does in SMDP systems with singleparty majority governments, the government policy score is equal to that one party’s LeftRight score.
Table 4 reports the relationships, by country, between government policy positions,
estimated in this way, and the plurality voter’s position. For comparison purposes, to see
how well government positions also align through time with median voter positions, Table 5
reports that set of relationships by country.8 So far as Table 4 goes, nine out of ten PR
8
The relationships are weighted by the proportion of time governments held office. A
government that holds office for four years receives four times the weight of a government holding
18
country slopes and five out of six SMDP country slopes are less than 1.0, (often statistically
significantly lower than 1.0 under PR). This indicates a near uniform tendency for
governments’ policy positions to be more centrist than would be the case were governments
to follow the plurality voter position on a one-to-one basis. Importantly, because we have
seen that the median voter is more centrist than the plurality voter, it also indicates erring on
the side of median-based ‘proportionality’ on policy.
[Table 4 about here]
[Table 5 about here]
The results in Table 5 show that six out of ten PR nations display a centrism which is
not quite so centrist as to match the median voter positions, however. The relationship is
statistically significantly greater than 1.0 in two cases (Italy and Sweden, using a one-tail
test). Among SMDP systems, the relationship between government and median voter
positions is significantly different from 1.0 only in the United States. And it must be noted
that it fails to produce a significant difference for France largely because government
positions are so unreliably associated with median voter positions there – indeed so
unreliably so that the slope value is not significantly different from zero either! In most
countries, government positions loosely but consistently track median voter positions (nearly
one-to-one).
Finally, we can compare the degree to which governments track plurality or median
voter positions more faithfully. The correlations show that all SMDP nations have
government positions more consistently fitted to the plurality voter position – even though, as
we have seen, they are not much at variance with median voter positions either. The PR
comparisons are more mixed. The Irish and Swiss governments do not track their plurality
voter positions even to a statistically significant degree, while in both nations there are
statistically significant relationships with median voter positions – in Switzerland with b = 1.0.
office for just one year. The weights are calculated as the proportion of total time from the first
government forming after the first election in the 1950s through the end of 1995. Time in
government is taken from Woldendorp, Keman, and Budge (2000). So that the number of cases for
each country equals the number of governments that formed during the period in that country, the
time proportions have been multiplied by the number of governments.
19
Running in the opposite direction are the results for Norway. There the relationship between
government and median voter positions is essentially nonexistent, at least reliably so, while
Norwegian government positions are reasonably strongly associated with plurality voter
positions.
With a few exceptions therefore governments follow the policy tracks set by both the
plurality and median voter. Indeed, in several countries it is as if governments split the
difference in the long run, somewhat more centrist than the plurality voter position and
somewhat more extreme than the median voter position. We suspect, therefore that the
theoretical ambiguity over whether electoral majorities are best indicated by the plurality or
median voter position is not often going to be of great moment in practical terms. Either or
both would lead to the same policy decisions being taken.
REVIEW AND CONCLUSIONS
This discussion has brought together theoretical concerns about majority
representation under democratic rules with comparative evidence, in the tradition of Lijphart’s
(1968, 1984, 1999) analyses and particularly Powell’s own (2000) and collaborative (1994,
2001) work. It has hopefully extended and deepened these authors’ concerns by suggesting
that ‘two visions’ of how to respond to majority wishes – or even to conceive of a majority –
coexist within every democracy rather than distinguishing one type of democracy from
another. (Though, as we have just seen, a slight tendency to favour the plurality under
SMDP still remains.)
Both the ‘proportional’ and ‘majoritarian’ visions are embedded within the very
structure of representative general elections, where voters are asked to decide on a number
of questions, only some of them bearing directly on policy: which government do they want?
which candidate do they prefer? which party do they like best? We cannot therefore assume
that voters simply choose the party closest to them on policy, which would lead to the party
preferred by the median voter being the obvious carrier of majority preferences (and possibly
becoming the plurality party too cf Downs, 1957, 118). On the other hand, we cannot
20
dismiss the possibility that policy voting occurs. But whether in a general election it favours
the median or plurality party is obscure.
Since elections overwhelmingly fail to produce a spontaneous majority in practice,
there is no guarantee that the median based ‘proportional’ and plurality based ‘majoritarian’
positions coincide (though they do in 44% of the cases we examined). Even where they are
different however both have claims to represent popular opinion, and neither claim can be
convincingly denied in the absence of pure policy-voting.
The horns of this dilemma are nonetheless blunted for most democracies by the fact
that, under a stable party system, both median and plurality shift marginally from election to
election in the same policy direction. Their actual policy positions may diverge but they
generally give the same indications of what the popular majority wants in the way of change.
In this sense governments – regardless of whether plurality or median parties form them –
can claim popular support for their policy innovations, conforming as they do to both
‘proportional’ and ‘majoritarian’ messages from the election.
In terms of government participation its clear identifiability (Powell, 2000, 61-80) gives
the plurality party an advantage, even under proportional rules and coalition-formation.
Balancing this, government policy for the most part seems to cater both for median and
plurality positions even under single-party governments. This is not surprising, given the
similarities we have identified between the policy messages they provide.
Superficially, our finding that election-messages tend to point in the same direction
resembles Soroka & Wlezien’s (2008) conclusion that there is little difference between the
preferences of various ‘sub-constituencies’ in the United States (rich and poor, voters and
non-voters, with some exceptions in regard to specific policy areas and perhaps levels of
education). This is in contrast to the findings of Gilens (2009) that there are wide variations
between different groups, a view supported by the comparative findings of Adams & Ezrow
(2009) on European opinion leaders. These are both left-leaning and disproportionately
influential in parties and on governments.
21
It would be nice if our findings contributed to this important debate. However we have
to point out that they are quite tangentle to the questions at issue in it. The positions
identified by election results could be those favoured by any demographic group and there is
nothing to say whether plurality or median policy positions favour Right or Left, rich or poor.
Indeed it is quite likely that over time the balance of opinion, as indicated by the election
results, shifts between all of these groups.
Our findings therefore relate more to the functioning of the central democratic
institution of elections than to their substantive impact. Whichever way one looks at them,
from a median or plurality point of view, elections tend to relay the same message about
majority preferences. Why should this be so?
We have already pointed out that the similarity between the median and plurality
preference is neither necessary nor logical in nature. It depends on the broad overall stability
of the party system at the electoral level. Where sequential elections simply transfer votes
between existing parties, even though the transfers may be relatively large, we can expect
that a plurality shift between Left and Right parties for example will be accompanied by a
shift in the median – probably between Centre-Left and Centre-Right. This is because the
median position, being estimated from the distribution of voters over the party alternatives,
will also register the movement of support from Left to Right.
Party systems in established democracies such as the ones examined here are
reasonably stable most of the time. Hence only limited transfers of votes occur between
election and election, median and plurality move in the same policy direction, and so
governments can be responsive to both. Where however a challenger suddenly takes
support from an established party on either Right or Left, splitting that ideological grouping,
the plurality position may be taken by an unchallenged party on the other wing. The median
however will still reflect the balance of votes between the ideological groupings rather than
between the parties as such. If the new challenger and the targeted party between them
have increased or retained their overall support the median will stay stable or shift towards
them. In that case the messages governments take from the election results will differ. This
22
simply reflects the general political upheaval that is taking place in that election however,
signalled by divisions in established parties or by new entrants to the electoral arena. When
the election situation stabilizes the median and plurality will again send the same message to
governments about the policy direction to take.
What our evidence reveals therefore, for the 16 post-war democracies we have
examined, is that elections organized by parties generally provide loose but consistent
representation of electoral preferences whether these are aggregated in ‘proportional’ or
‘majoritarian’ terms. This holds true whether, operationally, the majority is taken to be
represented by either the median or plurality voter positions, thus resolving the problems of
choice which open up in theory between the two. The two ‘visions’ of democracy, rather than
competing or distinguishing one type of democracy sharply from another, in practice
generally complement each other within the established framework of most democratic
systems.
23
Table 1
Arguments for the median or plurality positions to be taken as
representing the majority position under mixed motive voting
Arguments for the median position as
representing the majority preference:-
Arguments for the plurality position as
representing the majority preference:-
1. The median voter is essential to creating a
majority under the declared distribution of
votes so her position is the only one common
to all majorities and can be taken as the one
they would arrive at by negotiation and
discussion
1. The plurality grouping only failed to
become the majority by accident, possibly
owing to non-policy based factors affecting
voting
2. The median position is defined by the
voting preferences of all electors, not an
extreme group as could be the case with the
plurality
2. The plurality emerges spontaneously as a
result of voting. It is not artificially calculated
from the final distribution of votes and is thus
readily identified and held accountable
3. The median minimizes the overall distance
between individual declared preferences and
the majority position endorsed by the
election.
3. The plurality position is the single revealed
preference most representative of majority
opinion, particularly if it clearly has more
support than the next largest party grouping
4. There is always a plurality party1 but it is
not always easy to identify the ‘true’ and
‘unique’ policy median
1
Of course two parties might be returned with the same plurality. In this case both have to be
regarded as having its attributes.
24
25
26
27
28
FIGURE 1
The Median Position E and Plurality Position G in a
One-dimensional Policy Space
Parties
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
Left
% Seats/Votes
Right
10%
20%
7%
6%
10%
6%
41%
29
30
31
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