Do voter preferences matter between elections? Democratic performance in Western Democracies

Abstract

Over the years, several studies have examined government responsiveness and congruence in Western democracies by examining the relationship between the ideological positions of voters and governments. Although these studies generally find high levels of responsiveness and congruence, this research is limited by the fact that it has focused exclusively on governments that formed immediately after an election, thus implicitly ignoring governments that form between elections. This is an important omission, we argue, owing to both the number of governments that form between elections (nearly half in our sample of Western democracies) and theoretical expectations that suggest that responsiveness and congruence may look quite different in the absence of an election. In this paper, we reassess levels of democratic performance across 22 Western democracies utilizing data for all governments formed during the postwar period. For governments formed immediately after an election, we confirm the results of past studies that found high levels of congruence and responsiveness. However, extending the analysis to governments formed between elections, the level of government responsiveness appears to diminish over time with each new government. Our findings concerning levels of voter–government congruence are mixed, yet we do find some evidence of declining congruence as well. In sum, since many studies of postwar governments in Western democracies have been based on elections and the resulting governments, our analysis demonstrates the need to include those governments that form between elections.