Though the concept of choice is essential to democracy, little is known about how citizens make sense of the diversity of policies offered by political elites. Research has found that institutional arrangements such as low electoral thresholds and multiple party competitors are associated with greater policy choice. Other work emphasises non‐institutional factors. No research, however, examines what the voters think. In this article these alternative explanations are assessed in terms of whether citizens believe parties to provide choice over policy. Evidence from 25 democracies reveals that electoral and party systems have no direct effect. Choice perceptions are instead affected by non‐policy factors: social heterogeneity and individual political dispositions. This result contrasts with analyses showing a strong connection between electoral rules and the diversity of messages communicated by parties during campaigns. The article also shows how choice perceptions matter for political behaviour. Overall, study findings imply that the promise of institutions for fostering representation is weaker than previously assumed.

Being politically interested is one of the most important norms from a democratic perspective, as it is a crucial antecedent for voting, political knowledge, civic and political participation, and attentiveness to political information. However, only limited research has focused on the relationship between media use and political interest, despite the notion that modern politics is mediated politics. Even more important is the fact that the causal relationship between media use and political interest still has not been firmly established. Against this background, the purpose of this study is to investigate the causal relationship between news media use and political interest. The results show that there are indeed causal and reciprocal relationships between political interest and attention to political news, and between political interest and exposure to some, but not all, news media. Overall these results lend stronger support to the perspective of media mobilisation theories than media malaise theories.

Michael McDonald and Ian Budge have recently advanced an interpretation of democratic governance based on what they term the ‘median mandate’. This perspective locates the key element of liberal democracy in a close correspondence between government policy and the policy preferences of the median voter on the left‐right scale. The cross‐national evidence they produce in favour of this interpretation is impressive, but it largely hinges on a method for measuring the median voter position in each election that relies on the positions of the various parties in the election and the vote shares they received. This article examines the validity of the median mandate hypothesis when median positions are measured more directly from public opinion surveys (particularly, the Eurobarometer and Comparative Study of Electoral Systems series). The findings show that choice between distinct alternatives, rather than conformity to the median, more accurately characterises governance in democratic systems.

This article analyses the extent to which national policies in the highly internationalised environmental sector are influenced by the policy preferences of political parties. The focus is on policy outputs rather than environmental performance as the central indicator of policy change. Based on a discussion of the relevant theoretical literature competing hypotheses are presented. For an empirical test, a dataset is used that includes information on the number of environmental policies adopted in 18 OECD countries at four points in time between 1970 and 2000. The results show that not only international integration, economic development and problem pressure, but also aspects of party politics, influence the number of policies adopted. The number of environmental measures increases if the governmental parties adopt more pro‐environmentalist policy positions. This effect remains robust even when controlling for the institutional strength of governments, the left‐right position of parties in government, the inclusion of an ecological or left‐libertarian party inside the (coalition) government, and the presence of a portfolio that deals exclusively with environmental issues.

This article analyses the effects of political regimes over state capacity or the quality of government (QoG): Do democratic states perform better than authoritarian ones? Previous studies point to a nonlinear relationship between democracy and government quality. It is argued here that QoG is a function of both forces of supply (leaders who have the power to make reforms) and demand (citizens' desire for mid‐ to long‐term investments over short‐term needs), the latter of which is a function of economic development. In democratic states, leaders have stronger incentives to improve QoG after a certain degree of wealth is reached, while in poorer countries they have little incentive for long‐term bureaucratic investments. Thus it is predicted that the relationship between democracy and QoG is conditional, based on economic development. With over 125 countries in the sample, this hypothesis is tested using time‐series panel data and spatial models, and strong empirical support is found.

Internationalisation of markets and the demise of Keynesianism have made business more independent of associational action. Membership density and ‘corporatist’ involvement in wage bargaining and public policy have declined only modestly, while the capacity to govern members has dwindled significantly. This development is driven by the way in which large firms and the state relate to business associations. Large firms still have a vital interest not only in associational action, but also in integrating their smaller counterparts. Stated‐based support for multi‐employer bargaining, as established in most countries, buttresses business associations. By equipping the associations with an encompassing grip on the labour market, this support prompts governments to involve them in public policy. Since encompassing labour market regulation enables the associations to impose negative externalities on unaffiliated businesses, it provides them with a strong selective incentive for membership. The significant decline of the associations' governing capacity emanates from pressures of their large members to reduce costs of association. The implications of this development for interest intermediation are twofold. Given the strong decay of union power, the resilience of corporatism strongly hinges on the continued strength of organised business and on its state‐sponsored engagement in bargaining. At the same time, leeway for compromising has been restrained by the significant decline in the governing capacity of organised business. This decline echoes an ever‐growing predominance of large firms in business associations, while economic internationalisation exacerbates interest conflicts between larger and smaller firms. To the extent that this configuration of interest and power weakens the ability of business associations to integrate the mass of small firms, it develops into the new Achilles heel of corporatism.

In contrast to many other countries, the Finnish open‐list proportional representation (PR) system with its mandatory preferential voting provides an opportunity to study gender‐based voting empirically. Using the 2007 Finnish national election study, the article presents an analysis of the grounds for same‐gender voting, including motivations related to descriptive and substantive dimensions of representation. None of the motivations is able to account men's higher propensity to vote for a candidate of their own gender. The motivations linked to securing the descriptive and substantive representation of one's own gender in politics play a more decisive part on women's vote choice of same‐gender candidates. Voting for a same‐gender candidate is connected to younger age among both women and men, while the propensity to vote for female candidates increases with support for the Social Democrats, the Greens and the Swedish People's Party. Finally, gender, party choice, and descriptive and substantive motivations seem to be related to gender‐based voting for both parliamentary and presidential elections.

Recent research on the European Parliament (EP) has neglected the idiosyncrasies of niche parties. Similarly, analyses of niche parties have not fully engaged the literature on the EP. This article builds on both literatures by analysing niche party behaviour in the EP as a distinct phenomenon. It is argued that niche parties will respond differently to institutional stimuli than parties more generally. To test this argument, Hix, Noury and Roland's work on EP party voting behaviour is replicated concentrating on niche parties only. It is found that participation in national government and institutional changes affect niche party legislators' voting behaviour, whereas they do not for legislators in the EP overall. These results have important implications for understanding both party behaviour in the EP and niche party behaviour more generally.

This article examines the making of monetary policy in the United Kingdom between 1997 and 2008 by analysing voting behaviour in the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). It provides a new set of measures for the monetary policy preferences of individual MPC members by estimating a Bayesian item response model. The article demonstrates the usefulness of these measures by comparing the ideal points of outgoing MPC members with their successors and by looking at changes over time in the median ideal point on the MPC. The analysis indicates that the British Government has been able to move the position of the median voter on the MPC through its appointments to the Committee. This highlights the importance of central bank appointments for monetary policy.

Local government party systems are not necessarily copies of the national party system. In many countries, local party systems have come to resemble the national one more and more – a process Rokkan termed ‘party politicisation’. The traditional expectation has been that the take‐over of local politics by political parties, through a gradual process of societal modernisation, would eventually be complete. More recently, however, it has been suggested that reorganisations of the institutional set‐up – that is, amalgamations of municipalities – could entail developments in the degree of local party system nationalisation. This article investigates cultural and institutional explanations for party politicisation by analysing the Danish case from 1966 to 2005 – a period that witnessed both major amalgamation reforms and periods of stability in the local government structure. The data suggest that dramatic party politicisation does not lend itself to cultural explanations, but originates exclusively from changes in the institutional set‐up. Party politicisation is not a gradual process, but comes – at least in Denmark – in leaps coinciding with major reorganisations of the local government structure.

The expansion of women's formal political representation ranks among the most significant trends in international politics of the last 100 years. Though women made steady political progress, substantial country‐level variation exists in patterns of growth and change. In this article, longitudinal theories are developed to examine how political factors affect women's political representation over time. Latent growth curve models are used to assess the growth of women in politics in 110 countries from 1975 to 2000. The article investigates how electoral systems, national‐level gender quotas and growth of democracy – both political rights and civil liberties – impact country‐level trajectories of women's legislative representation. It is found: first, national quotas do affect women's political presence, but at a lower level than legislated by law; second, the impact of a proportional representation system on women's political representation is steady over time; and third, democracy, especially civil liberties, does not affect the level of women's political representation in the earliest period, but does influence the growth of women's political representation over time. These findings both reinforce and challenge prior cross‐sectional models of women's political representation.

At the beginning of the 1990s a new discourse emerged at the European Union level, insisting on the necessity of ‘civil society’ participation in decision‐making processes. Based on a ‘strategic‐constructivist’ research design, this article addresses the question of the emergence of this participatory turn in the official discourse and its transformation into a norm. It argues that the continued activism of an elite forum, consisting of political and administrative actors as well as academics, created the momentum that brought the concerned actors to accept the participatory norm and to play the roles required by it. However, due to internal competition amongst norm entrepreneurs, and a changed political situation, this norm is still contested, making it difficult to assess how its implementation will function.

The controversy between proximity and directional models of issue voting has not been settled. Instead of appointing an ultimate winner, this article explores the conditioning impact of the level of systemic polarisation and provides evidence that proximity is a more relevant determinant of voter behaviour in less polarised systems, whereas there is a centrifugal and directional dynamic in more polarised contexts. By so doing, the article shows how a largely forgotten notion – namely Sartori's idea of the spatial elasticity of the political spectrum – leads to different spatial viewpoints. In distinguishing between party (supply side) and voter (demand side) polarisation, this framework provides a comprehensive picture about the conditions that turn a centripetal electoral dynamic into a purely centrifugal one.

Anticipation is a central feature of political behaviour. It has an impact on actors' choices and can change the timing of decisions. This article analyses anticipation in legislative politics. After delineating different objects as well as consequences of anticipation theoretically, a set of hypotheses about anticipatory behaviour in EU decision‐making is derived. In particular, it is asked whether the EU Council anticipates the arrival of new Member States and how this affects legislative output. The theory is tested by estimating count models using a dataset that contains information on all binding EU legislation from 1976 to 2007. Covering five enlargement rounds, evidence is presented for anticipatory behaviour in EU legislative politics.

This article analyses four decades of annulment cases against the European Commission brought before the European Court of Justice by dissatisfied Member States. Annulment cases are interpreted as incidents of a struggle between Member State governments and the Commission about policy decisions. Studying annulment cases for the first time in comparative perspective, three important patterns of variation are identified: with respect to the evolution of annulment cases over time, as regards the Member States as plaintiffs and in view of policy fields. Subsequently the data are interpreted on the basis of structure, agency and policy field specific explanatory mechanisms. Leaving the aggregate level, the two policy areas that account for more than 80 per cent of annulments are analysed: EU agriculture and competition policy. In the vast majority of cases, the dominant rationale behind annulments is not national objections to the supranational exercise of delegated powers per se or in specific policies (as most structural theories would expect) but to the way the Commission uses these competences to restrict how national governments may allocate European or national funding.

This article analyses how political parties frame European integration, and gauges the consistency of their argumentation. Over the course of investigation, one can see how actors' positions are justified, and how the European Union is perceived (i.e., what forces give rise to Euroscepticism and Europeanism). It is argued here that the parties' framing of issues depends on the interests they traditionally defend at the national level, their general positions on European integration, and whether or not they belong to the established political actors in their respective countries. The coding approach enables the relation of frames to actors and positions, moving beyond the techniques employed by existing studies that analyse the media presentation of European integration. Sophisticated frame categorisations are provided to capture the complex structure of argumentation, going beyond a simple dichotomy of economic and cultural frames. Relying on a large and original media dataset covering the period 2004–2006, six Western European countries are investigated.

A central explanation of fiscal performance focuses on the structure of the cabinet. However, the partisan context of cabinet decisions remains under‐explored, the findings are based on small samples and the variables of interest are often poorly operationalised. Using a new dataset of spending ministers and partisan fragmentation in the cabinets of 58 countries between 1975 and 1998, this study finds a strong positive association between the number of spending ministers and budget deficits and expenditures, as well as weaker evidence that these effects increase with partisan fragmentation.