Empirical election studies conclude that party elites' images with respect to competence, integrity and party unity -attributes that we label character-based valence -affect their electoral support (Stone and Simas, 2010). We compile observations of media reports Downloaded from pertaining to governing party elites' character-based valence attributes, and we relate the content of these reports to mass support for the governing parties. We present pooled, time-series, analyses of party support and valence-related media reports in six European polities which suggest that these reports exert powerful electoral effects during election campaigns but little effect during off-election periods. This finding, which we label the Election Period Valence Effect, is consistent with previous work concluding that citizens are also more attentive to policy-based considerations and to national economic conditions around the time of elections. These findings have implications for political representation and for understanding election outcomes.

A normatively desirable feature of representative government is for the diversity of ideological choices on offer in the party system to reflect the diversity of policy views in the electorate. Building on the work of Ezrow, and relying on Eurobarometer data which suggest that the degree of public opinion diversity is stable over time, the authors analyse how voting systems mediate the diversity of views in parliament, a variable they label party system dispersion. The paper's central question is: to what extent does party system dispersion remain stable over time? Presented are theoretical arguments that party system dispersion will be more stable in countries that feature single-member district (SMD) voting systems than in proportional representation (PR) systems. Using cross-national data on 25 countries over 363 elections, the authors present results that support this hypothesis: they find that proportional representation systems are characterised by fluidity in party system dispersion, whereas party system dispersion in SMD countries remains stable from election to election. The implications of the findings are surprising -to the extent that party platforms reflect the diversity of public opinion within an electoral system, the results suggest that SMD systems do a better job at reflecting the diversity of public opinion viewpoints than do PR systems.

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