Parliamentary democracy means that the political executive is accountable to the parliamentary majority. However, when both the parliamentary majority and the cabinet consist of two or more distinct political parties, it is often difficult for the parliamentary majority to monitor and control the executive. In this article, we focus on political delegation from parliamentarians to the executive branch under multiparty parliamentary government. We identify the most important mechanisms parliamentary parties employ to remedy the accountability problems that may arise, as well as the arenas in which they are exercised: the executive arena, the parliamentary arena, and the extraparliamentary arena. We discuss the effectiveness of accountability mechanisms arena by arena, examine their use in 15 Western European countries that frequently feature coalition governments, and review our knowledge of how parliaments and parliamentary parties control political delegation and accountability in coalition governments.

A handful of recent studies have investigated the causal effect of incumbency on dynasty formation in candidate-centered electoral contexts. We use candidate-level data and a regression discontinuity design to estimate the incumbency advantage and its relation to dynasty formation in the party-centered, closed-list, proportional-representation setting of Norway. The results indicate that the incumbency advantage exists even in this party-centered environment; however, in contrast to recent findings for the United States and the Philippines, we find no evidence that incumbency is important to the formation of dynasties. This finding underscores the need for more research into the role of internal party organizational networks in the perpetuation of political dynasties.

Representative democracy entails the aggregation of multiple policy issues by parties into competing bundles of policies, or “manifestos,” which are then evaluated holistically by voters in elections. This aggregation process obscures the multidimensional policy preferences underlying a voter’s single choice of party or candidate. We address this problem through a conjoint experiment based on the actual party manifestos in Japan’s 2014 House of Representatives election. By juxtaposing sets of issue positions as hypothetical manifestos and asking respondents to choose one, our study identifies the effects of specific positions on the overall assessment of manifestos, heterogeneity in preferences among subgroups of respondents, and the popularity ranking of manifestos. Our analysis uncovers important discrepancies between voter preferences and the portrayal of the election results by politicians and the media as providing a policy mandate to the Liberal Democratic Party, underscoring the potential danger of inferring public opinion from election outcomes alone.

A substantial body of research examines whether increasing the proportionality of an electoral system increases turnout, mostly based on cross-national comparisons. In this study, we offer two main contributions to the previous literature. First, we show that moving from a single-member district system to proportional representation in multi-member districts should, according to recent theories of elite mobilization, produce a contraction in the distribution of mobilizational effort across districts, and hence a contraction in the distribution of turnout rates. Second, we exploit a within-country panel dataset based on stable subnational geographic units before and after Norway's historic 1921 electoral reform in order to test various implications stemming from the contraction hypothesis. We find significant support for the predictions of the elite mobilization models. (122 words) Word count: 8,793 words (excluding title page and online appendix)

Although politicians’ personal attributes are an important component of elections and representation, few studies have rigorously investigated which attributes are most relevant in shaping voters’ preferences for politicians, or whether these preferences vary across different electoral system contexts. We investigate these questions with a conjoint survey experiment using the case of Japan’s mixed-member bicameral system. We find that the attributes preferred by voters are not entirely consistent with the observed attributes of actual politicians. Moreover, voters’ preferences do not vary when asked to consider representation under different electoral system contexts, whereas the observed attributes of politicians do vary across these contexts. These findings point to the role of factors beyond voters’ sincere preferences, such as parties’ recruitment strategies, the effect of electoral rules on the salience of the personal vote, and the availability of different types of politicians, in determining the nature of representation.