Styles of Representation and Voters’ Evaluations of Democratic Performance: Parties and Party Voters

Abstract

This paper combines the nature and outcome of representation by analysing how different styles of representation emphasised within parties explain party voters’ evaluations of the performance of liberal democracy in their country, using for parties the Comparative Candidates Survey and for voters the European Social Survey 2012. Styles of representation are defined at the party level as the proportions of representatives within parties who are partisans, delegates or trustees. The results show that the more the trustee style is emphasised within parties, the more positively the performance of liberal democracy is evaluated. The relation for the delegate style is inverse; the more that style is emphasised, the more negatively democratic performance is rated, while the effect for the partisan style is negligible. It is argued that trustee parties are those who gain from the current political system, and are able to mobilise voters who evaluate liberal democracy positively, as opposed to voters of delegate parties which are less satisfied and evaluate democratic performance more negatively.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my two PhD supervisors, Hermann Schmitt and Ólafur Þ. Harðarson, for substantial comments on the work in process, as well as those who commented on an earlier draft of this paper when it was presented at the ‘The True European Voter: A Strategy for Analysing the Prospects of Electoral Democracy that Includes the West, the South and the East of the Continent’ and ‘The 3rd European Conference on Comparative Electoral Research’ 24–27 April 2014, Thessaloniki, Greece.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Eva H. Önnudóttir http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2344-4320

Notes

1. See Appendix 1 for the full question text and response scales.

2. In Gómez and Palacios’ (2016: 161) construction of the scale for respondents’ evaluations of the performance of liberal democracy they use one additional item about whether politicians take into account the views of other European government before making decisions. This item ranks the lowest in Kriesi et al.’s (2016: 73) analysis of the importance placed on liberal democracy, and for that reason, as well as that it could be linked to how integrated the countries are in European affairs, I exclude the item from the calculation of the scale for evaluation of liberal democratic performance.

3. There is a difference in terminology about voters between questions 1 and 2, the former asking about ‘his/her party voters’ and the latter about ‘constituency voters’. However, both are contrasted with either the party position or the MP’s own opinion. For that reason it is meaningful to apply the delegate role to those who name voters in questions 1 and 2 and contrast them with partisans and trustees.

4. The predicted values are calculated from full models (step 3) of the three regression models presented in Table 2. The dummy variables for social democratic/left-wing parties and Belgium, Ireland and the Netherlands are held constant at 1. Other variables are held constant at their means.

Additional information

Funding

The author’s PhD projects was funded by CDSS and MZES and the University of Mannheim, and by The Icelandic Research Fund for Students.

Notes on contributors

Eva H. Önnudóttir

Eva H. Önnudóttir is a post-doctoral researcher in political science at the University of Iceland. She defended her PhD at the CDSS/University of Mannheim in 2015. Her PhD project constituted of papers and the one presented here is part of that project. Önnudóttir is the director of the Icelandic Candidate Survey since 2009 and she is a member of various research networks such as the True European Voter (TEV), the Comparative Candidate Surveys (CCS) and the Icelandic National Election Study (ICENES).