Jettisoning Illusions About the Median Mandate

Abstract

We endorse G. Bingham Powell's cautionary corrective to challenge Paul Warwick's conclusions that the median mandate thesis needs to be jettisoned because there is not a close match between median voter and government left‐right positions. More to the point, however, we go beyond Powell's mild caution to challenge Warwick's rejection more assertively and thoroughly. We show his rejection mistakes responsiveness for congruence, misapprehends how and why the median mandate thesis distinguishes between those two concepts, and fails to take account of a measurement artifact associated with his survey data.

The Electoral System, the Party System and Accountability in Parliamentary Government

“…The first is that one cannot offer a normative assessment of the electoral accountability of a single election considered in isolation. In this respect, the representative counterpart to electoral accountability is not congruence but responsiveness in the sense conveyed by Powell (2000) and Best, Budge, and McDonald (2018). We suggest that scholars reconsider the relationship between electoral accountability and responsiveness in light of our findings.…”

Representation in Western Europe: Connecting party-voter congruence and party goals

“… 7. A further temporal aspect in responsiveness and congruence is highlighted by Best et al (2018: 13–15), who show that government responsiveness to the median voter is a long-term process that evens out individual governments’ incongruences if government parties alternate frequently. Such a (very) long-term perspective is, however, less applicable to representation by parties. …”