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Democratic representation and accountability presume that the programmatic choices offered by parties effectively address the concerns of mass publics. If voters do not believe that parties are able to redress those issues they deem central, it is hard to conclude that parties can be effective agents of representation. Curiously, however, students of party governments and representation research in advanced democracies rarely examine a key assumption of these mechanisms: do party programs offer solution that mass publics deem effective? In turn, how do competence attributions affect evaluations of the democratic process? This paper uses the CSES comparative public opinion data set to address these questions. The valence dimension of party politics - parties’ capacity to deliver policy outcomes valued highly by voters - has received little attention because it was widely assumed during the Golden Era of party-voter alignments that voters view at least one mainstream party as competent to address their concerns, namely the party they identified with. Surely most analysts would agree with Stokes’ famous 1963 conclusion that political competition does not just revolve around what kinds of measures parties propose but on whether they can 'get the job done'. However, during the Golden Era of stable party-voter alignments, partisanship forged a psychological bond between parties and voters that centrally shaped voter beliefs, including their evaluations of parties’ competence. There was presumably little need to analyze explicitly whether citizens would view at least one party as sufficiently competent to solve a problem a voter deems salient. Looking at politics through the lens of partisanship, then, party loyalists almost by definition considered 'their' party as being most competent to bring about desired states of politics, society and the economy. However, the party-voter bond has eroded significantly over the past decades in western democracies; and it has not had a chance to fully develop in newer democracies. Consequently, we may no longer assume that partisan loyalties germinate competence attributions to the degree that they once did during the Golden Era of stable partisan alignments. What is more, the growing transnational character of contemporary problems (e.g., integration and migration) means that no country has the sole authority to implement policy solutions. The decline of party-voter bonds, along with the changing character of issues, suggests that we should re-examine the “valence premise”: that voter typically do believe that for any given policy problem at least one party will be able to effectively provide a solution. Indeed, our initial analyses, using CSES data of module 3 on of a range of advanced democracies, reveal that a substantial proportion of publics do not believe that any party in their national parliaments offers a solution to what voters perceive to be the most pressing problems. At the Czech 2010 election, for instance, a whooping 55 percent of all voters saw no party as capable to offer a solution for the problem they deemed most important; and among those without a partisan affiliation, this share amounted to a striking 69 percent. Even in some mature democracies we find substantial proportions of critical voters, for example, in Germany, where 43 percent of independent voters perceive no party as competent in the 2009 election survey. On the other hand, we also note substantial cross-national variation between established democracies. At the 2007 Danish election only one percent of the independents voters saw no party as competent. Given the theoretical arguments and initial evidence, the goals of our paper are twofold. Our first aim is to describe these patterns on the basis of data from module 3 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). Then, we will examine the origins and consequences of competence attributions. Our initial analyses suggest that one simple “explanation” is easily put to rest: it is not just the uninformed, uneducated, uninterested voter that makes up the bulk of those who see mostly incompetent parties. Instead, the bulk of people are those without partisan affiliations. To document these patterns, to attempt to explain them, and to draw out their normative implications for representation-through-parties our central goal.
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