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?:abstract
  • This chapter deals with two fundamental questions of representative democracy: do parties in elections offer meaningful choices and if so, do voters make a reasonable use of the choices offered to them? The responsible party model demands that party elites articulate and try to realize the promises made in their manifesto, and that voters chose accordingly. In the following we investigate to which degree parties offer different choices, how well voters can conceptualize the parties’ policy offers, and under which conditions these offers translate into the voting decision. We use party stances in election platforms as the reference point as we believe that this is the most appropriate way to investigate the functioning of representative democracy: in party democracies political parties are the agents of the voters and the principals of the representatives. The chapter finds that voters are able to relate the multitude of issues and policies that are articulated in party manifestos to the left-right scale. Because the clarity of political supply differs across countries, voters’ ability to re-specify issue emphases and policy positions on the left-right dimension differs accordingly. The more clarity, i.e. ability to re-specify party’s platform content there is among voters, the more meaningful the choice set. Based on manifesto-based left-right estimates of party positions and CSES II – based measures of voters left-right self-placement, we investigate four hypotheses. One claims that ideological proximity matters the more for the vote the more clarity there is in the parties’ offers. The second hypothesis claims so for the sheer number of offers, the more the better. A third hypothesis claims this regarding the left-right range of a party system. And the fourth hypothesis claims this regarding the left-right differentiation of political supply as expressed in election platforms. Using pooled binary regression models with cross-level interactions, we test these hypotheses by investigating the marginal effects of proximity under varying conditions of our four macro-characteristics (clarity, effective number of parties, LR range of supply, LR differentiation of supply). The results are strongly supporting our four hypotheses. (xsd:string)
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  • (GLES) (xsd:string)
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  • GLES-Bibliography (xsd:string)
?:dateCreated
  • 1. Fassung, April 2012 (xsd:gyear)
?:dateModified
  • 2010 (xsd:gyear)
?:datePublished
  • 2010 (xsd:gyear)
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  • Meaningful Choices: Does Parties’ Supply Matter? (xsd:string)
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  • inproceedings (xsd:string)
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?:sourceCollection
  • Elections and Representative Democracy. Representation and Accountability (xsd:string)
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  • Bibsonomy (xsd:string)
  • In Elections and Representative Democracy. Representation and Accountability, 2010 (xsd:string)
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  • 11.11.-14.11.2010 (xsd:gyear)
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  • German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) (xsd:string)
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  • 2010 (xsd:string)
  • FDZ_Wahlen (xsd:string)
  • GLES (xsd:string)
  • GLES_input2011 (xsd:string)
  • GLES_pro (xsd:string)
  • GLES_version1 (xsd:string)
  • ZA5301 (xsd:string)
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  • inproceedings (xsd:string)
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