Evaluating the median voter model’s explanatory power

Abstract

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Politicians and Preferences of the Voter Majority: Does Gender Matter?

“…(), Stadelmann et al. (, ), and Carey and Hix (); for the United States Brunner et al. () provide an application.…”

“…Delegates in parliament are expected to represent voters' opinions. But the literature documents large deviations of parliamentary decisions from overall voters' preferences (Gerber and Lewis, ; Stadelmann et al., , ). Economists and political scientists have studied the effects of diverse political institutions on representation of voters' preferences, such as media and campaigning regulations, lobbying, majoritarian vs. plurality party systems, term restrictions, and many more (see Persson and Tabellini, ; Mueller, for overviews).…”

“…Votes in the Council of States are not registered electronically and, thus, research on individual voting behavior in the Council of States is still rare (see Stadelmann et al., for an exception).…”

District magnitude and representation of the majority’s preferences—a reply and new perspectives

“…For the Council of States, we do not find any significant difference in the quality of voter representation by individual politicians between districts with one representative and districts with two representatives (see Stadelmann et al 2012a). Carey and Hix (2011) suggest that the "electoral sweet spot" of low-magnitude is likely to be about four to eight seats per district and not two, as in the Council of States.…”

Transparency in parliamentary voting

“…This 1 The Lower House (National Council) is the proportional representation of the population whereas the Council of States (Upper House) represents the Swiss cantons. 2 Another stream of literature making use of these video records analyzes how well constituencies are represented by their respective councilors Stadelmann et al, 2012Stadelmann et al, , 2014. Bütikofer (2014) describes party line deviation and its determinants.…”