Fundamental to democratic politics is the quality of representation of constituents' interests by elected officials. This article statistically examines a case of substantive policy advocacy in Great Britain: the issues of wait times and health rationing by the National Health Service (NHS), salient throughout the Blair years. An increase in constituent need for care implies an increase in demand for parliamentary representation, yet representation will not necessarily be supplied, because legislators juggle conflicting interests. We measure representative action using parliamentary questions from 1997–2005. Party and parliamentary status and a set of indicators of the health of British citizens provide measures of political supply and constituent demand. Employing count-regression techniques, we find increased parliamentary questions as the proportion of individuals with some high health risks rises, but opposite results for other health risks. Evidence of political supply is much more consistent, suggesting that political careerism goes a long way towards explaining whether MPs table any questions at all in this policy area.

This article analyses the 2005 French referendum debate on the EU Constitutional Treaty as an instance of depoliticization. Particular emphasis is placed on the argumentative strategy of President Chirac as, despite the treaty's focus on institutional reform, he eventually chose to justify the document in terms of social policy: an ultimately unconvincing strategy because voters believed it was contradicted by current EU policy priorities. On this evidence, pace Glyn Morgan, prioritizing a justification of EU finality over that of institutions and policies does not seem appropriate. Rather, the priority for integration is to overcome elites' strategies of depoliticization during referendum campaigns.

This article's main argument complements the literature on transitions to democracy by focusing on the long-term process of political- elite formation and its influence on the ability of political elites to lead a peaceful and stable transition to democracy. By comparing the case of Israel before independence and the case of Palestine before the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, this article suggests that gradual political-elite formation from within the domestic population is likely to achieve better democratic results than a political- elite formation in exile, without close ties to the domestic population, that is ‘parachuted’ on the population when the political entity is formed.