Failing Political Representation or a Change in Kind? Models of Representation and Empirical Trends in Europe

Abstract

This article reviews Peter Mair’s argument on the failure of political parties and the subsequent failure of representative democracy in Europe. It develops a conceptual framework to test the validity of Mair’s argument against competing interpretations of the development of representative democracy. It identifies three ideal typical models of representative democracy that seem to have succeeded each other over time: cleavage-based democracy, competitive democracy, and audience democracy. The article proposes specific empirical hypotheses for political parties and voters in each of these periods and provides empirical evidence to test the validity of these hypotheses. It concludes with a discussion of the results, evaluating whether the changes that occurred indicate failure of representative democracy or rather the emergence of a different form of representative democracy.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference ‘Responsive or Responsible? Parties, Democracy and Global Markets – A Conference in Honour of Peter Mair’, European University Institute, 26–28 September 2012. The authors would like to thank participants at the conference, the editors of this special issue and the reviewers for their suggestions and feedback. The usual disclaimer applies.

Notes

1. This is not uncommon; Manin (1997) distinguishes three consecutive forms of representative government: parliamentarism, party democracy and audience democracy. Party democracy stretches from the rise of the mass parties at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century through to an ill-defined present time.

2. However, several authors have noted that in recent years new cleavages may be emerging (Kriesi et al. 2008). Nevertheless, while such new cleavages might constitute new lines of conflict within European societies and might even be accompanied by social divisions, common values, and institutionalisation, we contend that the degree to which these cleavages are institutionalised is unlikely to ever reach the levels that characterised the ‘frozen’ state of the 1950s and 1960s.

3. The scholarly debate on how to measure the policy positions of parties is ongoing, and while different sources such as manifesto data, expert surveys, and the perceptions of citizens have been used to locate parties on the left–right dimension, there is no agreement on what the best method is. Here we use data based on voter perceptions, since if it is to explain voter behaviour, voters’ perceptions of where the parties are located is the most relevant measurement, according to the famous Thomas theorem: ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’ (Thomas and Thomas 1928: 572).

4. This ‘true’ position of a party was measured by calculating the median of the perceptions of European Parliament candidates of the position of their own party’s national MPs (Van der Brug and Van der Eijk 1999: 144).

5. It must be noted, however, that these are overall results, generalised over electorates as a whole. As Van der Brug (2010) has shown, the importance of the left–right dimension for vote choice among young voters is much lower than for older generations, suggesting that over time the left–right dimension may indeed become less relevant for the vote choices of an ever larger part of the electorate.

6. The data reported are based on the 11 Western European democracies that were included in the EES from its inception in 1989 (France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Denmark, Luxembourg, Ireland, Greece, Spain, and Portugal). Party positions were measured by using the mean position as perceived by all voters, and congruence was then calculated by taking the absolute distance between the voter and the party they voted for. The mean congruence for all voters per party was then calculated. Positions on the left–right spectrum were measured in the same way in all years, except for 2009, where it was measured using an 11-point scale instead of 10-point scale, and the data were recoded to match the 10-point scales used in earlier years. Positions on European unification were measured differently in 1989 and 1994, after which the EES surveys used a 10-point European unification scale to position parties and voters. The same recoding procedure that was used to measure the left–right positions was applied to the 2009 data since these were also coded on an 11-point scale. In 1989, we measured voter positions by attitudes towards the EU, carried out factor analyses and used the resulting single factor score as an indication of voter positions – recoded to vary on the same scale as party positions. Party positions in 1989 were measured by the question: ‘perceived EC position party’. In 1994, voter and party positions were measured according to three questions on European unification; both voters and parties were then positioned on a 10-point scale: ‘National currency versus European Currency Unit (ECU)’, ‘Employment programme versus Single European Market (SEM)’ and ‘Remove borders versus rebuild borders’.