Building Measures of Ideology and Democratic Performance in Western Democracies

Florida State University, Tallahassee FL

Investigators

Abstract

In established democracies, the process by which citizen preferences are translated into government policy is supposed to follow a similar pattern. Citizens express their preferences in elections. This expression of preferences determines the composition of the parliament and the government. The government makes policy decisions. Voters react to the policies and their implementation by expressing their preferences through votes, and the cycle continues. At each stage of this process, different types of political institutions, such as electoral systems, regime types, the modes of coalition bargaining, and the modes of public policy making, work either to reinforce or to distort the preferences or ideological orientations in the previous stage. When good indicators of public opinion, parliament ideology, government ideology, and government policy are available, the democratic performance of political systems can be measured by the congruence between citizen's policy preferences and government policies. Many scholars have attempted to assess democratic performance under different political institutions. Their work has left room for improvement, however, since the measures of ideology they employed were available only for a limited number of countries and/or time periods. Further, determining the democratic performance of political institutions necessarily entails cross-national comparisons (since different countries have different institutions) and cross-time comparisons (since countries may adopt new institutions). It is questionable whether the measures employed by previous studies allow meaningful cross-national and cross-time comparisons. In this investigation, the researchers assess democratic performance of 25 Western democracies measures of ideology that allow valid cross-national and cross-time comparisons and that are consistently available for more countries and/or longer time periods than the existing measures. They start by utilizing a continuous measure of party ideology for 25 Western democracies developed earlier and based on party manifestos data compiled by the Manifesto Research Group. The researchers have already created a yearly series of voter ideology scores for these countries by combining election results with the corresponding measures of party ideology. They have also built a continuous measure of government ideology for 17 countries by taking a weighted average of party ideology scores, where the weights are the proportion of total cabinet portfolios held by each party. They continue this research program by collecting data for the number of parliamentary seats for each party in each country in the sample, for the postwar period through the late 90's. This allows the investigators to build a continuous measure of parliament ideology for Western democracies by taking a weighted average of party ideology scores, where the weights are the proportion of total parliamentary seats held by each party. They also complete their measure of government ideology by collecting cabinet portfolio data for eight countries for which government ideology scores have not yet been calculated. The data set will advance the broader research goal -- uncovering the impacts of different political institutions on democratic performance by utilizing measures of ideology and widely available data on policy outcomes and institutional features in Western democracies. This research adds to the existing knowledge about the political institutions that best translate people's preferences into government policy: for example, large or small electoral districts, proportional representation or single-member plurality electoral rules, direct or indirect elections (such as electoral college system), unicameral or bicameral legislatures, parliamentary or presidential systems, unitary or federal systems, etc. These data will be valuable to political scientists and policy makers alike.