The translation of citizen votes into legislative seats is of central importance in democratic electoral systems. It has been a longstanding concern among scholars in political science and in numerous other disciplines. Throughout this literature, two fundamental tenets of democratic theory, partisan bias and democratic representation, have often been confused. We develop a general statistical model of the relationship between votes and seats and separate these two important concepts theoretically and empirically. In so doing, we also solve several methodological problems with the study of seats, votes, and the cube law. An application to U.S. congressional districts provides estimates of bias and representation for each state and demonstrates the model's utility. Results of this application show distinct types of representation coexisting in U. S. states. Although most states have small partisan biases, there are some with a substantial degree of bias.
Generally considered patronage rather than issue oriented, the state of Indiana is usually above the suspicion of harboring political parties that adopt widely differing policy positions. In this study, the policy preferences of three different elite groups are compared with those of rank-and-file party members and Independents. Interestingly enough, each party's leadership sets are fairly tightly clustered. Furthermore, elite interparty cleavages are much greater than those displayed by any of the mass public groupings. Notwithstanding some popular images of Hoosier politics, the choice between Democratic and Republican leaders is real and palpable. Downloaded from 3. In the discussion of the results of the present analysis, legislators and their election opponents are treated as one. Presumably, this represents a legislative elite, which is distinct from delegates or chairmen as a leadership group. 4. There is some overlap among the different groups. For example, it is possible for a person to be a delegate and a legislative candidate or a chairman. 5. These polls were random design scientific surveys of approximately 800 respon-
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