Mechanisms of Representation

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“Mechanisms of representation” relate to the organization of politics and its consequences, and the processes through which interests or preferences are represented in the political system and the outcomes of public policy. This article explores a diverse set of mechanisms through which politics is organized, and through which the preferences or interests of the public, voters, groups, and economic interests are either advanced or obstructed. Traditional approaches of political science often adopted a narrow focus on the formal democratic qualities of elected government and the pluralism of the political system in incorporating different interests or preferences into the decision-making process and policy outcomes. Later waves of research sought to explore bias in mechanisms of representation, such as the disproportionate influence of interest groups in the governmental process and the power of agenda setting in determining which issues make it onto the decision-making table and when. Nevertheless, there continues to be considerable interest in the role of formal political institutions in determining the performance of representative democracy, how political parties act as vehicles for representation, and how elections can provide mandates to governments and enable voters to reward or punish political parties or candidates for the quality of their representation or performance. Indeed, a growing field of enquiry identifies a direct link between the preferences of the public and their representatives, either in the representation of constituency opinion or in the responsiveness of the political system as a whole. Despite this pervasive concern throughout the discipline of political science with the functioning of democratic politics, important changes in modern states, economies, and societies occurring outside elected institutions also shape representation, particularly as executive governance and politics has assumed increasing importance. The conventional understanding of mechanisms of representation is built upon shifting sands, with the emergence of the “regulatory state” and the decline of traditional distributive and command activities of government, and with ever more “networked,” “nonhierarchical,” and “transnational” modes of governing—often by unelected authorities. These changing institutional arrangements also reflect a response to the rise of risk as a focus of organization, as traditional social and economic cleavages are redrawn and reconstructed around questions of risk—often manmade, created through scientific innovation or economic progress. These changes point toward the changing battleground for representation both of public and political interests and the increasing importance of understanding questions of bureaucratic politics and control, transnational regulation, the management of risk, and the preoccupation of officeholders with the avoidance of blame. Mechanisms of representation shed light on all these things and more, encompassing the role of institutions in reflecting public or private interests in the decision-making process.

Introductory Works

“Who gets what, when, and how?” is the classic question posed by Lasswell 1936, which lies at the heart of all modern political science. Mechanisms of representation relate to the organization of politics and its consequences. Whose interests or preferences are represented, and when and how are they represented? The mechanisms of representation are numerous and diverse in their character and implications. Some accounts are rooted in theories of homo economicus, derived from assumptions about vote-seeking politicians and utility-maximizing citizens (see Downs 1957). Others stress the importance of collective action (Olson 1965), and institutions (North 1990 and Ostrom 1990). What unifies this field of enquiry is a concern with the mechanisms through which policy is made and policy outcomes are affected. Policies determine politics, Lowi 1972 argues. That is, particular sorts of policy tools—such as distributive, redistributive, or regulatory mechanisms—tend to be associated with certain configurations and expectations of outcomes, serving as a focal point for the mobilization of political preferences and interests. Distributive policies with few direct losers might be rather more consensual and less debated than those imposing compliance costs on industry or raising taxes, for example. As such, public policies set the parameters in which the conduct of politics takes place. Variation in policy domains leads to varying degrees of conflict and consensus. Policies are the “variable” of interest across a wide range of theoretical perspectives and empirical studies. The mechanisms of representation include, for example, political institutions, elections, parties, interest groups, public opinion, social movements, bureaucracies, judiciaries, legislatures, regulators, media, and technology itself. At the same time, understanding the mechanisms of representation requires us to understand the obstacles to change: the exclusion of certain groups from office or from the decision-making process, the power of the definition of alternatives through agenda setting and the expansion of conflict (Schattschneider 1960), and blame avoidance by officeholders. Further, the organization of politics is constantly testing boundaries and entering new spheres of mobilization, whether it is in the retrenchment of welfare states that followed postwar expansion, the government of risk, or the reshaping of the tools of governance in the digital age.

Downs, Anthony. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper & Row, 1957.
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Downs’s economic model of political competition is a founding work of rational-choice approaches to understanding democracy, outlining theoretical expectations regarding the spatial, left-right, distribution of voter preferences and the strategic reasons why parties have incentives to converge around the median voter.
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Lasswell, Harold. Politics: Who Gets What, When, How. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1936.
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One of the founders of modern political science, Harold Lasswell defined the study of politics as “the study of influence and the influential.” His is a broadly elitist conception of politics, but this work presents a framework for starting to unpick the question of who is represented.
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Lowi, Theodore J. “Four Systems of Policy, Politics, and Choice.” Public Administration Review 32.4 (1972): 298–310.
DOI: 10.2307/974990Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Building on a classic article published in World Politics in 1964, Lowi formulates a taxonomy for classification of public policy—the means of coercion of government—distinguishing between distributive, regulative, redistributive, and constituent forms of policy.
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North, Douglass C. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
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A seminal contribution for understanding the formation of political and economic institutions, and how these affect economic performance over time. North argues that institutions serve to reduce uncertainties and shape path dependence in economic development.
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Olson, Mancur. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965.
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An economic analysis that highlights the collective action problem for coordination of interest groups, as benefits from lobbying are a public good and there are incentives for participants to free-ride.
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Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
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A major contribution on collective action and institutional design. Considers the collective management of resources, suggesting that such “common pool resources” (CPRs) do not necessarily imply a “tragedy of the commons” and instead highlights the design principles of systems associated with successful management of CPRs.
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Schattschneider, Elmer E. The Semisovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America. New York: Holt, Reinhardt and Winston, 1960.
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One of the seminal works on agenda setting, and politics, more generally. Schattschneider’s ideas still resonate today as a challenge to pluralism and a thesis on the power of agenda setting: “The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent.”
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General Overviews

To understand mechanisms of representation, it is first essential to understand representation itself, as well as the democratic theories it has inspired. Pitkin 1967, a seminal work, provides a thoughtful and systematic deconstruction of the concept of representation, exploring its ambiguous and multifaceted form, and defining the set of general characteristics associated with it. Other contributions to the literature highlight tensions between representation and democratic values, measured against an Athenian ideal. For example, Manin 1997 argues that representative government combines both democratic and elitist elements through the delegation of power to the representative, which does not always reflect the will of the people in the decisions of government. The mechanisms of representation discussed here relate to a number of different dimensions of the political system that often compete or interact with one another, but that do not allow for a parsimonious or tidy demarcation of a unified literature of enquiry as there might be in other domains. Nevertheless, a few general sources would undoubtedly equip scholars with an analytical toolkit with which to tackle this field. The ten-volume Oxford Handbooks of Political Science series offers authoritative sources, with those volumes covering comparative politics (Boix and Stokes 2007), political institutions (Rhodes, et al. 2006), and public policy (Moran, et al. 2006) of particular relevance to the mechanisms of representation discussed in this bibliography. Each of these works provides an excellent introduction to this broad field, but they do not scrimp on high-quality scholarship from leading scholars in the field. Likewise, Stimson 2004 offers an overview of insights from the study of politics at the macro level in the United States.

Boix, Carles, and Susan C. Stokes, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
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This wide-ranging volume offers a survey of theory and practice in comparative politics, first examining influential research methods in the field before offering an overview of the foundations of political order and the state, mechanisms of representation, and the emergence of parties and collective action. It offers a range of insights on the role of institutions in the functioning of political systems.
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Manin, Bernard. The Principles of Representative Government. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511659935Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Manin argues that representative government is a combination of democratic and aristocratic elements, highlighting the overlooked aspects of representative systems and presenting a historical analysis of choice of democratic institutions ahead of alternatives.
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Moran, Michael, Martin Rein, and Robert E. Goodin, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Public Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
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Offers an excellent overview of the state of the art in the analysis of public policy, both in introducing key concepts and providing critical commentary.
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Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. The Concept of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
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Pitkin provides the seminal analytical deconstruction of the concept of representation, seeking first to understand the meaning of use of the term in language, distinguishing between the different forms of representation: formalistic (the institutional mechanism), symbolic (acts of representation), descriptive (resemblance between the representative and the represented), and substantive (the outcomes of representation).
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Rhodes, R. A. W., Sarah A. Binder, and Bert A. Rockman, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
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Another comprehensive overview from the Oxford Handbook series, outlining different theoretical approaches to the study of political institutions. The volume combines coverage of both the traditional concern of political science with constitutions, federalism, judiciaries, and bureaucracy, along with the emergence of “new institutionalist” approaches to understanding politics.
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Stimson, James A. Tides of Consent: How Public Opinion Shapes American Politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511791024Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Offering an accessible and extensive introduction to Jim Stimson and colleagues’ wider body of groundbreaking research on macro-politics in the United States, this book explains how public opinion shapes American politics and how the political system responds to changing public preferences and partisanship.
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Literature Reviews

There are a number of literature reviews across each of the mechanisms of representation discussed here, covering political institutions, elections, parties, interest groups, public opinion, and more. These are useful sources of information, summarizing the main theories and debates of the literature or discussing the state of the art in analysis and research methods. Just a selection is reported here. Powell 2004 offers a wide-ranging discussion of democratic representation and its foundations in electoral institutions and party systems. For an overview on the early literature on pluralism and community power, which was the precursor to later debates over the influence of organized interests as well as other mechanisms of representation, see Smith 1980, and see Von der Muhll 1977 for a specific review on the contribution of Robert Dahl to the study of contemporary democracy. Baumgartner 2010 offers an excellent review of the literature both on interest groups and agenda setting, reflecting on the importance of Schattschneider to both these fields of enquiry; also see Rogers, et al. 1993 for an alternative review on agenda-setting research. The influence of political parties on public policy is explored in a comprehensive meta-analysis of partisan effects in existing studies by Imbeau, et al. 2001. Relating to the literature on electoral reward-punishment of government, see Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier 2000 for a review of the literature on the electoral effects of the economy. See Wlezien and Soroka 2007 for excellent reviews of the representation of public opinion in public policy. See Lodge 2008 for a review of the rise of regulation as a mode of governance and the changing nature of the state in western Europe.

Baumgartner, Frank R. “Interest Groups and Agendas.” In The Oxford Handbook of American Political Parties and Interest Groups. Edited by L. Sandy Maisel and Jeffrey M. Berry, 519–533. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199542628.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A selective review that links the interest group and agenda-setting literatures, emphasizing the influence of Schattschneider’s work in both these fields.
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Imbeau, Louis M., François Pétry, and Moktar Lamari. “Left-Right Party Ideology and Government Policies: A Meta-Analysis.” European Journal of Political Research 40.1 (2001): 1–29.
DOI: 10.1111/1475-6765.00587Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A meta-analysis of the literature on left-right party control of government, using the findings from forty-three empirical studies to examine the mediating conditions under which partisan effects tend to be observed. Economic and foreign policy and post-1973 data are identified as conditions most related to positive findings on the partisan hypothesis.
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Lewis-Beck, Michael S., and Mary Stegmaier. “Economic Determinants of Electoral Outcomes.” Annual Review of Political Science 3 (2000): 183–219.
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This review article on the state of the art in economic voting summarizes research on the important effects of economics on electoral outcomes in democracies. It reviews evidence from the United States as well as comparative studies, highlighting different methods and variables used in analysis.
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Lodge, Martin. “Regulation, the Regulatory State and European Politics.” West European Politics 31.1–2 (2008): 280–301.
DOI: 10.1080/01402380701835074Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An interesting paper that offers a critical analysis of the claimed rise of the regulatory state in Europe, seeking to understand the importance of this phenomenon and the substantive insights gained through its study. Useful as an introduction to debates over the regulatory state in European politics.
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Powell, G. Bingham, Jr. “Political Representation in Comparative Politics.” Annual Review of Political Science 7 (2004): 273–296.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.polisci.7.012003.104815Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A review of studies of the electoral link between citizens and policymakers in democracies. Powell distinguishes between vote-seat representation, through the impact of party-electoral systems, and substantive representation, both through the effect of constituency opinion on individual representatives and the effect of public preferences on the political system as a whole.
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Rogers, Everett M., James W. Dearing, and Dorine Bregman. “The Anatomy of Agenda-Setting Research.” Journal of Communication 43.2 (1993): 68–84.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1460-2466.1993.tb01263.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examines the literature on agenda setting, distinguishing between studies of media, public, and policy agendas, as well as studies that synthesize those types of enquiry. Through a survey of publications on agenda setting, the authors identify growth in this field of study. Due to its publication date (1993), the article misses out on the new wave of research on policy agendas since the early 1990s, in particular the influential work of Baumgartner and Jones.
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Smith, Russ M. “Community Power Studies: The Effect of Research Biases.” State and Local Government Review 12.2 (1980): 74–79.
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A review essay that identifies four periods of community power research and discusses the effects of researcher biases on conclusions on the nature of community power.
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Von der Muhll, George. “Robert A. Dahl and the Study of Contemporary Democracy: A Review Essay.” American Political Science Review 71.3 (1977): 1070–1096.
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A review essay commentating on the multiple paradigms of the work of Robert Dahl, one of the pioneers of the study of modern democratic government. It remarks upon the variety of Dahl’s work—which includes economics and politics, community government, pluralism, the concept of political power, foreign policy, government size, and civic participation—and its contribution to the understanding of democratic politics.
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Wlezien, Christopher, and Stuart N. Soroka. “The Relationship between Public Opinion and Public Policy.” In The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior. Edited by Russell J. Dalton and Hans-Deiter Klingemann, 799–817. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199270125.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A clear and thoughtful introduction to the literature on policy-opinion responsiveness by two of the leading scholars in this area. The chapter first presents formal notation to characterize the policy-opinion relationship, and then reviews the literature and its implications in some depth. Wlezien and Soroka make the important distinction between studies of policy consistency, policy covariation, and dynamic representation.
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Journals

Theoretical and empirical enquiry into mechanisms of representation is far-reaching and diverse, overlapping between a number of subfields of political science. Work of relevance is regularly published in general political-science journals. Specialist journals provide an important source of research literature focused upon particular mechanisms of representation, such as those concerned with the workings of public policy and executive governance, and others concerned with democracy, public opinion, and electoral behavior.

General

Some of the research of relevance to the mechanisms of representation, ranging across their various aspects, is published in general political science journals, including the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Political Studies. These tend to have large readerships drawn from across the political science discipline, and they often are published in conjunction with a professional association such as the American Political Science Association or the Political Studies Association in the United Kingdom.

American Journal of Political Science.
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A leading international generalist journal of political science that publishes articles across a range of fields of enquiry, including contributions related to elections, institutions, political behavior, and governance.
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British Journal of Political Science.
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One of the premier international journals of political science, the British Journal of Political Science publishes contributions from all fields of political science, including important developments in the study of political institutions, political behavior, and public policy.
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Comparative Political Studies.
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Unique among the top political science journals for being published monthly rather than quarterly, Comparative Political Studies consists of research articles focused on comparative politics, and it promotes innovation in theory, methodology, and empirical analysis.
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Journal of Politics.
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One of the top general journals of political science, the Journal of Politics publishes research from subfields across the discipline, including comparative politics, international relations, political methodology, formal analysis, public administration, and public policy.
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Political Studies.
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The journal of the Political Studies Association in the United Kingdom, Political Studies is a leading international journal. It adopts a pluralistic approach to the political science discipline and publishes research from across the discipline, encompassing a range of theoretical approaches and methodologies.
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Public Policy and Executive Governance

Specialist journals in the fields of public policy and executive governance and politics are important sources of information both on policymaking processes and the administration of policy. These examine the role of interest groups, bureaucratic agencies, and other actors in the political process, as well as considering how political representation is organized in relation to issues such as risk. Such research focused on questions of public policy and executive governance can be found in journals such as Public Administration, Governance, Policy Studies Journal, and Government and Opposition.

Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration and Institutions.
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A journal aimed at theoretical and empirical enquiry into executive politics, public policy, administration and the organization of the state. Often publishes articles with an international or comparative approach to the study of politics, policy, and administration.
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Government and Opposition.
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An international journal of comparative politics that publishes high-quality articles across a range of theoretical and empirical topics. Government and Opposition is notable for its distinctive blending of enquiry into democratic politics with an interest in governance and major issues in public policy, such as risk and regulation.
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Policy Studies Journal.
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Promotes the study of policy processes and their institutional settings. Policy Studies Journal publishes research focused at theoretical understanding of public policy and decision making, and on empirical studies in this area. The journal also promotes an interest in methodological approaches to public policy analysis.
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Public Administration.
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This journal specializes in the study of public administration, public policy, and public management, publishing both theoretical and empirical contributions that are increasingly comparative in their scope and application.
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Democracy, Public Opinion, and Electoral Behavior

Journals specializing in public opinion and electoral behavior are an important source of material concerning the link between the preferences of the public and the actions of representative government, and the quality of democracy more broadly. Questions of democratic representation are therefore a recurring topic of research in journals such as Representation, the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, the International Journal of Public Opinion Research and Public Opinion Quarterly.

International Journal of Public Opinion Research.
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The International Journal of Public Opinion Research (IJPOR) is a leading journal aimed at both practitioners and academics in the field of public opinion research.
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Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties.
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The Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties (JEPOP) specializes in research on voting behavior, electoral institutions, public opinion, participation, and political parties. It often publishes research related to the effect of electoral systems on democratic representation, as well as on public preferences.
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Public Opinion Quarterly.
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An interdisciplinary journal, specializing in opinion and communication research, Public Opinion Quarterly is an important source for researchers across the social sciences. It publishes work related to public opinion, the validity of survey instruments, and communications research.
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Representation.
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This journal has a specific interest in the study of elections and voting systems, but it publishes work more broadly related to questions of “representative democracy.”
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Pluralism

The nature of the distribution of power in democratic systems became one of the defining questions for political science during the 1950s and 1960s, and it is at the root of understanding the mechanisms of representation, of exploring the processes through which preferences and interests are transmitted into policy outcomes, whether or not the concentration of power lies with narrow interests or wider publics. In Dahl 1961, a classic study of power structures in policymaking in New Haven, Connecticut, Robert Dahl sought to answer the question, “Who governs?” Pluralism offered a descriptive response to the works of elite theorists, such as Hunter 1953 and Mills 1956, which stressed the dominant influence of governing elites in the political system. In contrast, pluralists suggested that democracy is founded upon open competition between interests. As such, representation extends to the inclusion of groups with resources in decision-making processes; see Dahl 1961 and Polsby 1963, for example. Since Dahl’s seminal intervention, debate has raged between the proponents of pluralism and those emphasizing the preeminent influence of certain groups above others (see Domhoff 1978 for a critique of Dahl’s original study in New Haven). Neo-pluralists have since adapted pluralist models to stress the bias toward corporate interests; for example, Lindblom 1977 highlights the “privileged position” of business interests under polyarchy. Pluralism has also inspired important theoretical work on the nature of power. Bacharach and Baratz 1962, an influential article on the “two faces of power,” stressed the importance of the power to keep some issues off the agenda and exclude certain interests (i.e., nondecisions). Pluralist debates still permeate much of contemporary political science, as researchers seeks to measure the relative influence of mechanisms of representation such as interest groups, elections, public opinion, and bureaucracies—contrasted against the power of elites—and their effect on policy outcomes.

Bachrach, Peter, and Morton Baratz. “The Two Faces of Power.” American Political Science Review 56.4 (1962): 947–952.
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Offering a response to studies of community power, Bachrach and Baratz identify a “second face” of power, with parallels to Schattschneider’s observation of the power of the definition of alternatives. This article provides a classic theorization of the nature of political power that includes both decision making and non-decision making, and it laid the foundations for later advances in the study of agenda setting and interest groups.
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Dahl, Robert A. Who Governs: Democracy and Power in an American City. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961.
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The classic study of community decision making in New Haven that refuted the finding of Hunter 1953 that power resided with a small handful of business leaders; Dahl observes, in contrast, a pluralist distribution of power, with a range of groups possessing influence, some direct and some indirect.
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Domhoff, G. William. Who Really Rules? New Haven and Community Power Reexamined. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1978.
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Undertakes a reexamination of community power in New Haven, combining new interviews and a reanalysis of the original interviews from Dahl 1961. The findings suggest the dominance of landowners and developers in the governance of urban renewal in New Haven, with less pluralist implications that the original inferences.
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Hunter, Floyd. Community Power Structure: A Study of Decision Makers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953.
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Introduces the elite theory of power at the micro level in its study of power structures within an unnamed “Regional City.” Hunter argues that decision-making power is concentrated within a small group of individuals who have disproportionate influence within the community.
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Lindblom, Charles E. Politics and Markets: The World’s Political Economic Systems. New York: Basic Books, 1977.
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An influential neo-pluralist analysis of democracy that focuses on the relationship between government and business. Lindblom identifies the weakness of earlier pluralist accounts of polyarchy, where corporate interests gain special treatment and influence over the issues that make it onto the decision-making agenda.
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Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956.
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A classic statement of elite theory, introducing the term “power elite.” Mills identifies a triumvirate of elite groups at the top of US society: political, economic, and military. These elites are characterized by a shared worldview, overlap and movement of individuals between domains, and the exercise of influence over governmental, financial, civic, and cultural institutions.
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Polsby, Nelson W. Community Power and Political Theory. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963.
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An exploration of community power that tests the effects of social stratification—the division of communities into socioeconomic groups—both in terms of participation in decision making and in terms of who prevails.
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Interest Groups and Agendas

Political organization remains an important mechanism through which citizens institutionalize and express preferences, and through which issues become salient. It has long been argued that such a pluralistic perspective is naïve, and that bias is pervasive in interest representation, with the inclusion of certain interests and sections of society in decision making at the expense of others—in particular the dominance of socioeconomic and corporate interests. Further, the influence of interest groups in policy “subsystems” has had long associations with questions of agenda setting and the processes through which certain issues access and remain on the political agenda while others are kept off it, leading to policy change. The presence of a monopolizing institutional structure, consisting of interest groups, expert communities, and government departments or agencies, along with a particular issue definition (i.e., frame) has been identified as a source of long-term stability in public policy, subject to disproportionate reactions when the threshold for change is exceeded—often due to something such as an exogenous shock. Such an approach emphasizes the importance of subsystems and stability as mechanisms of representation, but also the equal importance of the dynamic processes through which change in public policy occurs.

Interest Groups and the Governmental Process

The representation of interests in the governmental process, in particular through the mobilization of groups, is at the heart of the pluralist tradition of political science; see Truman 1951 and Dahl 1961 (cited under Pluralism), for example. However, pluralist accounts of organized interests are problematic and have come under critique from subsequent generations of research that explore bias and access in the “pressure system” and organizational traits of groups. Olson 1965 (under Introductory Works) provided an influential economic theory of groups, highlighting the collective action problem, arising from the incentives for free-rider behavior, and potential for the disproportionate influence of smaller groups. Political organization remains a mechanism through which citizens institutionalize and express preferences and through which issues become salient—see Wilson 1973 and Moe 1980 for analyses of the interest group system in the United States, and Baumgartner and Leech 1998 for an overview of the literature. It has long been argued that bias is pervasive in interest representation, with inclusion of certain interests and sections of society in decision making at the expense of others (see Schattschneider 1960, cited under Introductory Works). Some groups are able to mobilize far greater resources to ensure their interests are attended to. Studies have shown social bias in political activities in general (Verba and Nie 1972) and corporate bias in the interest group system in particular (Baumgartner, et al. 2009). Increasingly, analyses of interest groups broadly accept the influence wielded over the political process and instead explore how such groups originate, maintain themselves, and interact with other groups, government, and the public (see Walker 1991). Further, work also examines the relationship between government and the population traits of interest groups (Lowery and Gray 1995).

Baumgartner, Frank R., Jeffrey M. Berry, Marie Hojnacki, David C. Kimball, and Beth L. Leech. Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
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A comprehensive US study that finds that lobbying rarely results in policy change, instead reflecting tremendous bias in favor of the status quo, in which issues tend to be organized around at least two sides. This exerts friction against change—maintained through elected officials and existing policies, and the mobilization of entrenched interests to resist change.
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Baumgartner, Frank R., and Beth L. Leech. Basic Interests: The Importance of Groups in Politics and in Political Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1998.
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In an important review of developments in the study of interest groups, Baumgartner and Leech link changes in the academic literature’s view of the power of groups in the US political process to changes in the methodological and conceptual approach of political science over the same period.
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Lowery, David, and Virginia Gray. “The Population Ecology of Gucci Gulch, or the Natural Regulation of Interest Group Numbers in the American States.” American Journal of Political Science 39.1 (1995): 1–29.
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This article represents an important development in the study of groups, in its application of a population ecology model to predict the number of interest groups in the United States as a function of potential constituents, the stability of the political system and the government, and the prospective goods, services, and regulations that are obtainable through the governmental process.
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Moe, Terry. The Organization of Interests: Incentives and the Internal Dynamics of Political Interest Groups. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
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An examination of the collective action problem described in Olson 1965 (cited under Introductory Works). Characteristic of the literature on groups around this period, Moe seeks to explain why people join political organizations and what sustains their membership, combining explanations based both on individual and collective behavior.
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Truman, David B. The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951.
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An early study of the role of groups in the governmental process, reflecting the dominant pluralist outlook of the period. Truman presents a framework for understanding group behavior, in which interest groups are mobilized to reflect the interests of their members, and that, as such, interest representation should reflect the issues of concern to the population as a whole. An important advance in the study of interest groups.
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Verba, Sidney, and Norman H. Nie. Participation in America: Political Democracy and Social Equality. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.
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A seminal account of participatory politics. Verba and Nie conducted an impressive study of who participates in American politics—in voting, campaigning, collective activity, and interaction with public officials. Using national and elite surveys, they observed a correlation between socioeconomic status and participation in democratic activities.
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Walker, Jack L. Mobilizing Interest Groups in America: Patrons, Professions, and Social Movements. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991.
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An impressive collection of works on the role of interest groups in the US political system, highlighting the “inside” and “outside” strategies of groups for survival and the exercise of influence. Notable for Walker’s discussion of the importance of patrons, social movements, and professional assistance in mobilizing groups as a challenge to policy subsystems. The empirical analysis is therefore much richer than economic models of interest groups.
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Wilson, James Q. Political Organizations. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
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Wilson argues political organizations are not simply neutral mechanisms for transmission of citizens’ preferences but that they also shape those preferences through their internal organization. Wilson develops a typology based upon the incentives used to attract and retain members, distinguishing, for example, between purposive incentives related to goals of the organization and selective incentives derived for the individual from belonging to a particular group.
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Agenda Setting and Policy Change

Overlapping with processes of interest representation through mobilization of collective action, studies of agenda setting seek to understand the processes through which issues access and remain on the political agenda (or are kept off it), and how these lead to policy change. The “definition of alternatives,” according to Schattschneider 1960 (cited under Introductory Works),“is the supreme instrument of power” (p. 68), meaning that framing of an issue can determine both its mobilization of support and the terms of political conflict. While an earlier wave of studies focused upon the power of the mass media to determine the set of issues that are on the public mind (see Cohen 1963, McCombs and Shaw 1972), later work has sought to understand the conditions under which issues come onto the formal agenda of government and policy change occurs. These highlight the effect of factors such as issue networks and support coalitions, institutional venues, problem definition and policy entrepreneurs (see, for example, Cobb and Elder 1972 and Kingdon 1984). In a groundbreaking contribution to the field, Baumgartner and Jones 1993 observe that extended periods of stability in public policy are, from time to time, punctuated by moments of dramatic change. The punctuated equilibrium theory of policy change emphasizes that the preponderance of policymaking occurs outside the reach of the macro-political agenda, in policy “subsystems” consisting of a monopolizing institutional structure and a particular issue definition (i.e., a particular frame). These institutional subsystems dampen pressure for change, but periodically undergo shocks and positive feedback processes that lead to an expansion of the political agenda, while frames can also undergo sudden changes, as attention shifts from one dimension of an issue to another. For example, Baumgartner, et al. 2008 shows how change in the definition of the “innocence” frame contributed to a change in the application of the death penalty in the United States. While developed in the United States, there is growing comparative evidence on the punctuated distribution of policy agendas (see Baumgartner, et al. 2009).

Baumgartner, Frank R., Christian Breunig, Christoffer Green-Pedersen, et al. “Punctuated Equilibrium in Comparative Perspective.” American Journal of Political Science 53.3 (2009): 602–619.
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An important comparative study of the effects of institutional design on the pattern of change in the outputs of governmental processes in the United States, Belgium, and Denmark. The findings are consistent with the theory of punctuated equilibrium in policy change, with the processes subject to the greatest degree of institutional “friction” associated with the most uneven pattern of change—combining extended periods of stasis and occasional extreme shifts.
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Baumgartner, Frank R., Suzanna L. De Boef, and Amber E. Boydstun. The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
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An impressive and compelling account of policy framing, linking discovery of the innocence frame (identified in media content analysis) to changes in public opinion and a steep decline in the number of death sentences and executions in the United States. Overall, the book offers tremendous insight into the complex relationship between public opinion, media, and policy, and it combines sophisticated methodological analysis with thoughtful theoretical analysis and a large array of empirical data.
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Baumgartner, Frank R., and Bryan D. Jones. Agendas and Instability in American Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
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Baumgartner and Jones’s classic study of policy change in the United States, in which they developed their punctuated equilibrium model of policy change, with the insight that public policies tend to be subject to extended periods of stasis and occasional periods of dramatic and rapid change.
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Cobb, Roger W., and Charles D. Elder. Participation in American Politics: The Dynamics of Agenda-Building. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1972.
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Cobb and Elder explore the links between the public arena (the “systematic agenda”) and the “formal” agenda of government policymaking, focusing upon how issues are generated through social conflict.
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Cohen, Bernard C. The Press and Foreign Policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963.
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A forerunner of media agenda-setting research, based on interview research. The analyses focus on the role of the press as an information broker, and on its power to shape the decisions of government officials and legislators. This is one of the first systematic studies of the agenda-setting power of the media.
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Kingdon, John. Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984.
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This study seeks to resolve the classic question of agenda setting, of why some issues come to be elevated onto the governmental agenda while others are overlooked. Kingdon’s account also highlights the importance of problem recognition and the definition of alternatives, through which proposals are selected as policy. This provides a model of the policy process where the problem, policy, and political “streams” must intersect for change to come about.
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McCombs, Maxwell E., and Donald L. Shaw. “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media.” Public Opinion Quarterly 36.2 (1972): 176–187.
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This pioneering analysis of undecided voters during the 1968 US presidential campaign demonstrated a significant correlation between media content and the salience of issues to voters. The findings presented an important confirmation of the theory of the agenda-setting power of the media.
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Politics of Attention and Information

While agenda setting has long been interested in the conditions associated with policy change, a more recent generation of research has sought to examine how policymakers cope with an abundance of information across a multitude of problems and issues, requiring prioritization and selective attention in decision making, notably in Jones and Baumgartner 2005, another literature-shaping intervention. Jones and Baumgartner’s model of attention-driven choice focuses on disproportionate information-processing in the representation of issues on the governmental agenda. When decision making occurs in the context of an information-rich world, attention is scarce and decision making is bounded (see Simon 1957). This offers a challenge to the rational updating processes implicit to traditional incremental models of budgeting, such as in Lindblom 1959, suggesting instead that decision makers are subject to cognitive limitations and biases, using reference points and heuristics, where some information signals are over-weighted and other signals are disregarded. Padgett 1980 observed earlier that the incremental model did not hold, with bounded rationality in budgeting exhibited in occasional catastrophic shifts. This disproportionate dynamic of responsiveness generates a general pattern of over- and under-reaction in policy change, generalizing the punctuated equilibrium model of agenda setting discussed earlier. The attention-driven model of public policy (see Jones 1994) has been tested with evidence of the punctuated distribution of budget changes, both in the United States (Jones, et al. 2009) and in comparative studies (Breunig 2006; Jones, et al. 2009). Similar unstable dynamics of attention are observed in the content of party manifestos (Walgrave and Nuytemans 2009). Further, analyses of the dynamic relationship between governing agendas and public opinion suggest that both error-accumulation and error-correction processes are present (Jennings and John 2009).

Breunig, Christian. “The More Things Change, the More Things Stay the Same: A Comparative Analysis of Budget Punctuations.” Journal of European Public Policy 13.7 (2006): 1069–1085.
DOI: 10.1080/13501760600924167Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A comparative analysis of punctuated equilibrium in budget changes over time, testing the effect of partisan control and distance on patterns of budgeting.
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Jennings, Will, and Peter John. “The Dynamics of Political Attention: Public Opinion and the Queen’s Speech in the United Kingdom.” American Journal of Political Science 53.4 (2009): 838–854.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2009.00404.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An analysis of the link between public opinion and the agenda of government in the United Kingdom, this paper explores the coexistence of negative and positive feedback. It uses “error-correction” models to show how policymakers’ and the public’s attention to issues can coexist in a moving equilibrium, despite the presence of punctuated equilibrium in public policy.
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Jones, Bryan D. Reconceiving Decision-Making in Democratic Politics: Attention, Choice, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
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An important contribution to the literature that uses insights from social psychology to explain why policy can be subject to significant change while preferences are often stable. Jones highlights the limited cognitive capabilities of decision makers, leading them to assign their attention to just a few issues at a time. This attention-driven model provides important insights on the punctuated equilibrium in policy change noted by Baumgartner and Jones in other work.
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Jones, Bryan D., Frank R. Baumgartner, and James L. True. “Policy Punctuations: U.S. Budget Authority, 1947–1995.” Journal of Politics 60.1 (1998): 1–33.
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This article tests for the presence of punctuated equilibrium in federal government spending in the United States for the entire postwar period. It finds that despite much stability for most spending categories, most of the time there is more change than is typically suggested in the incrementalist literature, and that overall patterns of spending are divided into three epochs by punctuations that correspond to shifts in expectations about the role of government.
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Jones, Bryan D., and Frank R. Baumgartner. The Politics of Attention: How Government Prioritizes Problems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
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Building upon insights from a long-standing and influential program of research, Jones and Baumgartner develop a disproportionate information-processing model of political attention to understand the processes through which government assigns its attention and prioritizes issues, presenting a substantial set of evidence on activities of US governing institutions.
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Jones, Bryan D., Frank R. Baumgartner, Christian Breunig, et al. “A General Empirical Law of Public Budgets: A Comparative Analysis.” American Journal of Political Science 53.4 (2009): 855–873.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2009.00405.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An application of the disproportionate information-processing model in budgeting, offering a comparative test of the distribution of budget change distributions across a number of Western democracies. The findings indicate the presence of punctuations in patterns of change and the effect of formal institutional structures on the degree of “friction” in budget changes.
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Lindblom, Charles. “The ‘Science’ of Muddling Through.” Public Administration Review 19.2 (1959): 79–88.
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Classic article that offers an important critique of rationalist models, highlighting the limits of decision making and incremental tendencies of the administrative and policy process.
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Padgett, John F. “Bounded Rationality in Budgetary Research.” American Political Science Review 74.2 (1980): 354–372.
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This article develops a bounded rationality model of budgetary decision making, finding that budgets are not consistent with a perfect incremental model and instead are subject to occasional “catastrophic” shifts.
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Simon, Herbert A. Models of Man: Social and Rational; Mathematical Essays on Rational Human Behavior in a Social Setting. New York: Wiley, 1957.
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A seminal contribution to decision-making psychology that is central to our understanding of policymaking. Simon observes that individuals are “boundedly rational,” due to limits in their ability to formulate and solve complex problems in processing information. Decision makers are “satisficers,” making approximations and using heuristics rather than pursuing economically optimal strategies.
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Walgrave, Stefaan, and Michiel Nuytemans. “Friction and Party Manifesto Change in 25 Countries, 1945–98.” American Journal of Political Science 53.1 (2009): 190–206.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2008.00365.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Shows that the content of party manifestos is also consistent with the presence of “friction” in decision making, giving rise to punctuated equilibrium in party platforms agendas and also demonstrating that variations in the pattern of change are related to differences in party and political systems.
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Party Politics and Institutions

Institutions are at the heart of understanding the representation of the public, voters, groups, and other organized interests in the political process. These institutions define the rules of the game for government, for political parties, for voters, and for interests. The role of institutions in democratic representation has inspired a large volume of comparative analysis of the effect of the design of political systems on government performance and political culture, often contrasting differences between majoritarian and consensus democracies. Further, within the institutional setting that sets the rules of the game for electoral competition, political parties are an important mechanism for the direct transmission of the preferences of voters, or a narrower pool of supporters, into the platforms and programs of political parties, which in turn affect the outputs of government. Studies have come to quite different conclusions on the degree of partisan influence on policy outcomes, highlighting the importance of caution when discussing the role of political parties as mechanisms of representation. Nevertheless, elections are an important institutional instrument for regulating democratic politics and acting as a mechanism for ensuring the responsiveness of government to the public.

Institutions and Representation

Political institutions are of consequence for both the processes and outcomes of democratic representation. Debates over the effect of institutions on representation are often framed in relation to the differences between majoritarian and proportional electoral systems, such as Lijphart 1984, which argues that “consensual” democracies provide greater responsiveness in responding to the preferences of the greatest possible number. Because representative government is founded upon the electoral act of delegation, principal-agent frameworks have often been applied in institutional analysis of representation, such as in Przeworski, et al. 1999 and Strøm, et al. 2003. Others have considered the territorial basis of representation (see Rehfeld 2005), while others have reflected on how population size shapes democratic government (see Dahl and Tufte 1973). The design of electoral systems impact upon both political representation and voting behavior, and are of significance in developing contexts as well as in advanced democracies (Reilly 2001, Norris 2004). Further, differences in dynamic representation are also expected, and discovered, between presidential and parliamentary systems, where the separation of powers in the former is associated with a greater degree of responsiveness to public preferences (Soroka and Wlezien 2010).

Dahl, Robert A., and Edward R. Tufte. Size and Democracy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1973.
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A classic treatise that explores the consequences of the size of governmental units (e.g., population, land area, natural resources, gross national output) for the performance of democratic government. The analysis centers upon variables such as participation (measured with turnout).
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Lijphart, Arend. Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-One Countries. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984.
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Offers an influential mapping of modern democracies—constituted in party systems, electoral systems, and the organization of executives—on a scale from “majoritarianism” to “consensus” ideal types. Lijphart examines the effect of different forms of democracy on outcomes such as economic performance and the quality of democracy.
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Norris, Pippa. Electoral Engineering: Voting Rules and Political Behavior. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511790980Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Reflecting a growing interest in “electoral engineering” in new democracies, this book explores two approaches—rational choice institutionalism and cultural modernization theories—to analyze the link between electoral systems and voting behavior. The first approach emphasizes the significance of formal rules on political competition and behavior, while the latter focuses upon the importance of social norms and habits.
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Przeworski, Adam, Susan C. Stokes, and Bernard Manin, eds. Democracy, Accountability, and Representation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
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An edited volume presenting a set of essays that consider representation and democratic accountability from the perspective of the principal-agent control problem.
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Rehfeld, Andrew. The Concept of Constituency: Political Representation, Democratic Legitimacy, and Institutional Design. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511509674Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Rehfeld considers the territorial framing of representation, seeking to answer the question, “Why do democratic governments define political representation by where people live?”
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Reilly, Benjamin. Democracy in Divided Societies: Electoral Engineering for Conflict Management. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511491108Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An account that considers the effect of electoral design as a mechanism of conflict management in divided societies, considering a range of comparative evidence.
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Soroka, Stuart N., and Christopher Wlezien. Degrees of Democracy: Politics, Public Opinion, and Policy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
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An impressive and detailed conceptual and empirical examination of the “thermostatic” model of public preferences and policy representation, drawing upon evidence from the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. Soroka and Wlezien show important variation in public responsiveness and patterns of representation according to variation in political institutions.
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Strøm, Kaare, Wolfgang C. Müller, and Torbjörn Bergman, eds. Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
DOI: 10.1093/019829784X.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Uses the principal-agent framework to explore representation issues in a study of seventeen West European parliamentary democracies, where delegation from voters to elected representatives is one link in the chain of delegation in parliamentary democracies.
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Political Parties and Public Policy

Across different political systems, party control of government is expected to influence the legislative and executive agenda, generating changes in public policy. This mechanism of representation implies a direct transmission mechanism: the preferences of voters are reflected in party platforms (e.g., manifestos) and election outcomes, which in turn lead to change in the outputs of government (see Budge and Hofferbert 1990 and MacDonald and Budge 2005). Political parties are the carriers of public policies, differentiating their policy positions in responsible representation of their supporters, even at the expense of strategic special logic (Adams 2001). Analyses of partisan effects on public policy are often comparative, using data on the spatial positions of parties and voters—such as the extensive research program used in Budge, et al 2001. Hibbs 1977, an influential work, suggests differences in macroeconomic outcomes (in particular inflation and unemployment) under governments of the left and right, while party differences are identified both in public welfare outputs (Castles and McKinlay 1979) and government expenditure (Blais, et al. 1996). A few studies, however, such as Rose 1980 have suggested that partisan effects on government policies are small.

Adams, James. Party Competition and Responsible Party Government: A Theory of Spatial Competition Based upon Insights from Behavioral Voting Research. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.
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Adams sets out to explain the important question of how it is that spatial models of party competition suggest convergence toward the median voter, and that parties in fact engage in responsible representation, offering platforms that respect the preferences of their divergent supporters. The analysis suggests that partisan identification produces stable and divergent (i.e. representative) party platforms that reflect the views of their supporters.
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Blais, André, Donald Blake, and Stéphane Dion. “Do Parties Make a Difference? A Reappraisal.” American Journal of Political Science 40.2 (1996): 514–520.
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A reexamination of earlier research on the relationship between partisan composition of government and public expenditure. The article finds that partisan control makes a difference to spending. It also finds that there is a not a difference between majority and minority governments in this regard.
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Budge, Ian, and Richard I. Hofferbert. “Mandates and Policy Outputs: U.S. Party Platforms and Federal Expenditures.” American Political Science Review 84.1 (1990): 111–132.
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An important test of the party mandate theory in the United States. Contrary to claims of the weakness of political parties in the US political system, Budge and Hofferbert find strong links between election platforms and governmental outputs, measured in the form of federal expenditure.
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Budge, Ian, Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Andrea Volkens, Judith Bara, and Eric Tanenbaum. Mapping Policy Preferences: Estimates for Parties, Electors, and Governments 1945–1998. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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An introduction to the extensive program of research that emerged out of the activities of the Manifestos Research Group, founded in 1979, this book details the coding system of the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) and the procedures used to estimate the policy positions of parties, government, and voters in twenty-five democracies over the postwar period. This is an essential read for scholars working in the literature on political parties where the use of CMP data is widespread.
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Castles, Francis G., and Robert D. McKinlay. “Does Politics Matter? An Analysis of the Public Welfare Commitment in Advanced Democratic States.” European Journal of Political Research 7.2 (1979): 169–186.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-6765.1979.tb01274.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An article that seeks to explore whether “politics” makes a difference to policy outcomes. Castles and McKinlay evaluate the effects of both economic and political variables on public welfare commitments in advanced democracies, finding that while economic factors cannot be dismissed, political factors (e.g., political structure, leadership, and ideology) are more important in determining the level of public welfare outputs.
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Hibbs, Douglas A., Jr. “Political Parties and Macroeconomic Policy.” American Political Science Review 71.4 (December 1977): 1467–1487.
DOI: 10.2307/1961490Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A seminal article on partisan effects on macroeconomic outcomes. The statistical analyses find that while differences between parties are commonplace, the direct effects of the electoral calendar are rare. Hibbs observes that left-wing parties tend to be associated with economic growth and lower unemployment, while right-wing parties tend to be associated with reduced inflation.
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McDonald, Michael D., and Ian Budge. Elections, Parties, Democracy: Conferring the Median Mandate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
DOI: 10.1093/0199286728.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An important theoretical examination of the median mandate approach to understanding democratic politics, founded upon the necessary connection between public preferences and public policy. Tested with an empirical analysis of data from twenty-one countries.
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Rose, Richard. Do Parties Make a Difference? London: Macmillan, 1980.
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In a study of the influence of parties in Britain on public policies and policy outcomes between 1957 and 1979, Rose finds that there is no great difference between parties using a range of data such as manifestos, polls, and economic indicators.
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Elections as Instruments of Democracy

At the heart of understanding representative democracy is the transmission of political preferences through elections and electoral outcomes. Key 1955 put forth the theory of critical elections and the idea of electoral realignments with lasting effects for politics and policymaking. Mayhew 2002, in a detailed account, challenges the notion of electoral realignments and their effect on American politics, while Jones, et al. 2009 finds no evidence of realignments in the United States since the Great Depression. While realignments are associated with the creation of an electoral coalition that persists well into the future, clear election outcomes can also deliver a mandate for a program of change that does not have the same long-term implications for party support. Grossback, et al. 2006 considers the effect of perceived electoral mandates on the behavior of legislators, the media, and the public. Further, elections provide a means to both reward and punish government for its performance. Such a mechanism of public restraint of government is implicit to Fiorina’s reward-punishment model of voting, where incumbents are rewarded for good performance and punished for bad (see Fiorina 1981). Such thinking is often associated with economic models of voting; see, for example, Sanders, et al. 1987 and Anderson 1995. The function of elections as instruments of democracy is central to comparative research on political systems; for example, Powell 2000 compares the effect of majoritarian and proportional electoral systems on policy outcomes.

Anderson, Christopher J. Blaming the Government: Citizens and the Economy in Five European Democracies. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1995.
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The effect of economic factors on the popularity function of government is well known. There is variation across time and across countries, however. Anderson investigates the impact of macroeconomic conditions on support for governing parties in Britain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany. In an important development, this considers the effect of institutional structures on voters’ attribution of credit or blame for economic performance.
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Fiorina, Morris P. Retrospective Voting in American Elections. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.
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In an important contribution to an understanding of political behavior, Fiorina promotes the importance of retrospective voting, based on a “reward-punishment” model. Over time, voters use past experience of a party’s performance to develop expectations about which is most likely to deliver its platform. This model is groundbreaking in suggesting that party identification serves as a “running tally” of accumulated evaluations of party performance, and not some irrational affiliation or emotional attachment.
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Grossback, Lawrence J., David A. M. Peterson, and James A. Stimson. Mandate Politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
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From time to time, elections are declared mandates by popular consensus. The authors set out to advance an understanding of these rare mandates in the United States, both of their origins and their effects on legislators, media, and voters. It is argues that the response of legislators to a series of defining elections (1964, 1980, and 1994) produced a large number of the groundbreaking policies of the era, with long-term consequences for public policy.
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Jones, Bryan D., Chang-Jin Kim, and Richard Startz. “Does Congress Realign or Smoothly Adjust? A Discrete Switching Model of Congressional Partisan Regimes.” Statistical Methodology 7.3 (2009): 254–276.
DOI: 10.1016/j.stamet.2009.10.002Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In a challenge to studies of long-term cyclical patterns in partisan regimes that emphasis critical elections and turning points, Jones and colleagues use a Markov switching method to diagnose the partisan balance of national elections, performing better than the estimates of cyclical models. This identifies critical transition points between Republican and Democratic regimes. While recessions were associated with realignments prior to 1932, effects of economic downturns on partisan regimes have not been observed since.
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Key, V. O., Jr. “A Theory of Critical Elections.” Journal of Politics 17.1 (1955): 3–18.
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A seminal article that introduces the concept of a critical election, in which there is a “sharp and durable” electoral realignment as new electoral cleavages are created that persist into the future. Key focuses his study of voting behavior on two realigning elections in the United States: 1896 and 1928.
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Mayhew, David R. Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.
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Presents a systematic challenge to the theory of electoral realignments, arguing that claims of studies of realignments are overstated. Mayhew identifies eleven empirically distinct propositions associated with realignment theory (e.g., cyclicality, turnout, issue cleavages, ideological elections), and subjects these to systematic testing. Further, Mayhew suggests that valence issues (in contrast to position issues) related to government management are increasingly accepted as a major driving force in US political history.
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Powell, G. Bingham, Jr. Elections as Instruments of Democracy: Majoritarian and Proportional Visions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
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Offers a thoughtful examination of differences between the majoritarian and consensual models of democracy, and of the electoral mechanisms through which citizens delegate power to policymakers to enact programs (majoritarian) or provide representation in post-election bargaining and the dispersal of power (consensual).
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Sanders, David, Hugh Ward, David Marsh, and Tony Fletcher. “Government Popularity and the Falklands War: A Reassessment.” British Journal of Political Science 17.3 (1987): 281–313.
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123400004762Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A classic article debunking conventional wisdom that the Falklands War was the critical factor responsible for the Conservative victory in the 1983 UK general election. Sanders and colleagues show that the Conservatives electoral fortunes were already improving ahead of the war, due to an improvement in the national economic outlook, and that any boost attributable to the Falklands crisis was short lived.
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Public Opinion and Public Policy

The connection between public opinion and public policy is of central concern for contemporary political science, especially with respect to the study of advanced democracies. This analytical concern with the link between the preferences of the public and the actions of representative government has roots in the classical tradition of liberal and democratic theory. Representation is both a feature of electoral politics and a mechanism for ensuring the responsiveness of government to the public. At a broad level of abstraction, democratic representation is constituted in a relationship between a principal (the represented) and an agent (the representative), often based upon territorial and formal principles, under which elected government is expected to be responsive to the preferences of their citizens, who in turn are able to hold government to account. Research concerned with public opinion and policy focuses both upon representation of constituents by individual officeholders and the responsiveness of the political system as a whole in producing public policies that reflect the preferences of the public. While much research on representation and responsiveness is preoccupied with satisfaction of preferences on a left-right continuum, there is increasing interest in public evaluations of government performance and competence, and in the importance of “valence” issues, as a feature of democratic politics.

Dyadic Representation

For some, representation is constituted in the relationship between individual representatives and individual constituencies. This has become known as “dyadic” representation (see Weissberg 1978), where the underlying expectation is that “legislators ought to reflect purposively the preferences of their constituents” (McCrone and Kuklinski 1979, p. 278). Classic studies of democratic representation, pioneered in the United States, include Miller and Stokes 1963 and Cnudde and McCrone 1966, which measured congruence between constituency opinion and the roll-call behavior of legislators in Congress. This research reflected a growing interest in the United States in the relationship between the legislative votes of congressmen and constituency preferences or other characteristics; see for example, Mayhew 1974 and Fenno 1978. It also inspired a generation of studies on the link between constituent preferences and policy outcomes, such as Erikson 1978 and Bartels 1991. The link between constituents and their representatives tends to be enabled or constrained by institutional features of the political system, which in turn colors the focus and findings of the literature. For example, in Britain’s Westminster system, the political tradition of party discipline and cohesion, combined with executive control of the legislative timetable, restricts the opportunities for legislators to represent their constituents; see Norton and Wood 1993.

Bartels, Larry M. “Constituency Opinion and Congressional Policy Making: The Reagan Defense Buildup.” American Political Science Review 85.2 (1991): 457–474.
DOI: 10.2307/1963169Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An interesting analysis of the effect of constituency opinion on representatives activities across a range of defense spending issues, finding considerable effects of the preferences of constituents on defense spending as part of the Reagan defense buildup.
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Cnudde, Charles F., and Donald J. McCrone. “The Linkage between Constituency Attitudes and Congressional Voting Behaviour: A Causal Model.” American Political Science Review 60.1 (1966): 66–72.
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Soon after the seminal study Miller and Stokes 1963, Cnudde and McCrone sought to test the link between roll-call behavior of legislators on civil rights and constituency opinion. This confirms the finding of the link between representatives’ perceptions of mass opinion but does not replicate evidence of a direct link between the attitudes of members of Congress and constituency opinion—contrary to suggestions of elite recruitment.
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Erikson, Robert S. “Constituency Opinion and Congressional Behavior: A Reexamination of the Miller-Stokes Representation Data.” American Journal of Political Science 22.3 (1978): 511–535.
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A replication of the classic study Miller and Stokes 1963, controlling for measurement error in sample-based estimates of constituency opinion, Erikson finds that correlations between constituency opinion and roll-call behavior increase if simulations are used rather than sample-based estimates.
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Fenno, Richard F., Jr. Home Style: House Members in Their Districts. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978.
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One of the definitive studies of the behavior of individual representatives, Fenno emphasizes the importance of legislators in the US Congress developing a “home style” for the goal of re-election. Further, the model of representation suggests that legislators interact with a number of different subconstituencies in their activities.
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Mayhew, David R. Congress: The Electoral Connection. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974.
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An important contribution to the understanding of the US Congress, with insights that have impacted outside the United States. Mayhew’s study of the activities of legislators highlights the position-taking behavior of elected representatives. Advertising and credit claiming by legislators are characteristic of symbolic representation.
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McCrone, Donald J., and James H. Kuklinski. “The Delegate Theory of Representation.” American Journal of Political Science 23.2 (1979): 278–300.
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An empirical test of the delegate theory of representation, highlighting that this form of representation does occur under specific conditions, that legislators view themselves as delegates, and that constituencies provide clear signals regarding preferences.
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Miller, Warren E., and Donald E. Stokes. “Constituency Influence in Congress.” American Political Science Review 57.1 (1963): 45–56.
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In a groundbreaking research article for enquiry into democratic politics, Miller and Stokes investigate the link between individual legislator’s roll-call activities and the preferences of their constituents, using quantitative methods that were in little use at the time. The findings of their analysis indicate that while legislators’ own preferences are a factor in their decisions, these also reflect constituency opinion. This is linked to the recruitment of representatives by political parties.
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Norton, Philip, and David M. Wood. Back from Westminster: British Members of Parliament and their Constituents. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 1993.
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A rich analysis of the changing nature of legislative representation in the United Kingdom’s Westminster system. Norton and Wood examine different models of parliamentary representation, considering factors such as constituency service, policy advocacy, and the personal vote.
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Weissberg, Robert. “Collective vs. Dyadic Representation in Congress.” American Political Science Review 72.2 (1978): 535–547.
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Using the data from Miller and Stokes’s classic study of constituency representation (Miller and Stokes 1963), Weissberg finds that public opinion is better represented collectively than dyadically.
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Dynamic Representation

For some, representation operates as a relationship between public opinion and policy that is structured in time. The idea of “dynamic representation” considers the degree to which preceding changes in public preferences are correlated with subsequent changes in policies, such as expenditure or legislation. An early example of this is Hartley and Russett 1992, a study on public opinion and US defense spending. The groundbreaking work of Stimson, Erikson, and Mackuen on macro-preferences and macro-politics (see Stimson, et al. 1995 and Erikson, et al. 2002) emphasizes the continuous character of shifts and transitions in the behavior of government and the public, rather than such change simply occurring between two points in time. While representation occurs through the mechanism of elections, it also occurs in the rational anticipation of policymakers. Similar findings are observed in relation to macro-politics in Britain, see Bartle, et al. 2011. The model of dynamic representation argues that policy adjusts over time to changes in public preferences. The findings from this research are quite profound: “When electoral politicians sense a shift in public preferences, they act directly and effectively to shift the direction of public policy. We find no evidence of delay or hesitation” (Stimson, et al. 1995, p. 560). Around this same time, Christopher Wlezien developed a “thermostatic” model of public opinion to conceptualize dynamic reciprocal links between government expenditure and public preferences across a number of domains (Wlezien 1996). Studies of dynamic representation have been undertaken to consider opinion-responsiveness in specific domains, such as in environmental policy in the United States (see Johnson, et al. 2005) and on the issue of immigration and asylum in the United Kingdom (Jennings 2009). Further, there is also evidence in comparative research of dynamic representation of median voters in party competition (McDonald and Budge 2005), while recent studies suggest political parties are more responsive to opinion leaders than public preferences as a whole (Adams and Ezrow 2009).

Adams, James, and Lawrence Ezrow. “Who Do European Parties Represent? How Western European Parties Represent the Policy Preferences of Opinion Leaders.” Journal of Politics 71.1 (2009): 206–223.
DOI: 10.1017/S0022381608090130Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Reflecting a growing interest in heterogeneity in preferences and representation, this article offers a thorough examination of dynamic representation of the preferences of subconstituencies for twelve western European democracies between 1973 and 2002, using estimates of the spatial position of party platforms. The findings indicate that political parties are responsive to “opinion leaders” (citizens with regular engagement in political discourse) but not the wider public.
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Bartle, John, Sebastian Dellepiane-Avellaneda, and James A. Stimson. “The Moving Centre: Policy Preferences in Britain, 1945–2005.” British Journal of Political Science 41.2 (2011): 259–285.
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Building upon an application of Stimson’s method for estimation of public policy mood for the United Kingdom, this analysis identifies long-run variation in public preferences in the United Kingdom. Notably, this shifts in response to the level of government activity (in terms of expenditure and taxation), and has consequences for the outcome of general elections.
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Erikson, Robert S., Michael B. MacKuen, and James A. Stimson. The Macro Polity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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Building upon a long-running program of impressive research, Erikson, Mackuen, and Stimson present a definitive examination of the workings of American politics at the system, focusing on the formation of political attitudes and their interactions with government over time. This covers a range of important topics, including presidential approval, macro-partisanship, public preferences, and dynamic representation through public policy.
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Hartley, Thomas, and Bruce Russett. “Public Opinion and the Common Defense: Who Governs Military Spending in the United States?” American Political Science Review 86.4 (1992): 905–915.
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A study of the effect of public opinion on military spending in the United States between 1965 and 1990. While spending is responsive to aggregate public opinion, the authors found a greater effect from levels of Soviet spending and the gap between US and Soviet spending than from public opinion. They found no evidence that government shapes public preferences.
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Jennings, Will. “The Public Thermostat, Political Responsiveness and Error-Correction: Border Control and Asylum in Britain, 1994–2007.” British Journal of Political Science 39.4 (2009): 847–870.
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An analysis of the effect of public opinion about immigration and asylum on the UK government’s management of border controls and processing of asylum applicants during the 1990s and 2000s. Uses an “error-correction” model to represent the moving equilibrium between the public agenda and bureaucratic outputs and outcomes.
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Johnson, Martin, Paul Brace, and Kevin Arceneaux. “Public Opinion and Dynamic Representation in the American States: The Case of Environmental Attitudes.” Social Science Quarterly 86.1 (2005): 87–108.
DOI: 10.1111/j.0038-4941.2005.00292.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Investigates the linkages between environmental conditions, public opinion, and public policies in the US states, finding support for a thermostatic model of policy representation, where state-level public opinion is responsive to environmental conditions and policy outputs.
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McDonald, M., and Ian Budge. Elections, Parties, Democracy: Conferring the Median Mandate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
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An important theoretical examination of the median mandate approach to understanding democratic politics, founded upon the necessary connection between public preferences and public policy. Tested with an empirical analysis of data from twenty-one countries.
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Stimson, James A., Michael B. MacKuen, and Robert S. Erikson. “Dynamic Representation.” American Political Science Review 89.3 (1995): 543–565.
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Now classic article exploring the relationship between public preferences (“mood”) and policy across a range of governing institutions. Finds considerable evidence for rational anticipation, as policymakers respond to shifts in public opinion and do not wait for the expression of preferences through elections.
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Wlezien, Christopher. “Dynamics of Representation: The Case of US Spending on Defence.” British Journal of Political Science 26.1 (1996): 81–103.
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123400007420Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An important work linking dynamic representation of public preferences in public policy to the thermostatic model of public opinion, as the public adjusts its preference for policy in light of what policymakers actually do. Wlezien’s analysis considers data on spending and preferences across a number of domains in the United States.
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Performance Politics

In terms of public preferences, a final mechanism of representation occurs in the degree to which parties or candidates are rated and then rewarded for competence, performance, handling, and trust in terms of public policy and in the delivery of public services, earning a reputation for being trusted on certain issues or across all issues (see Green and Jennings 2009). In an influential response to the Downsian spatial model of vote choice, Stokes 1963 made the distinction between valence issues and positional issues. The former are issues where there is public consensus on aims or preferences—such as economic growth or reduction of crime—but where there are competing claims as to which political party of candidate would best deliver on the issue. Performance is a dimension of politics with substantive consequences for citizens’ well-being and experience of public services. The emergence of valence or performance politics as a dimension of electoral competition has been notable in the United Kingdom where there is a growing literature; for example, see Clarke, et al. 2004; Clarke, et al. 2009; and Green 2007. Valence theories have a substantial overlap with retrospective economic voting models (Fiorina 1981), often focusing upon the performance of incumbents. They are also often associated with leader effects in studies of public support, with strong and competent leaders exerting positive effects on support for their party (Clarke and Lebo 2003).

Clarke, Harold D., and Matthew Lebo. “Fractional (Co)integration and Governing Party Support in Britain.” British Journal of Political Science 33.2 (2003): 283–301.
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This study demonstrates the effect of prime ministerial approval on support for governing parties in Britain, as well as finding effects for personal economic retrospections and expectations.
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Clarke, Harold D., David Sanders, Marianne C. Stewart, and Paul F. Whiteley. Political Choice in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
DOI: 10.1093/019924488X.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Built upon analysis of British election studies and public opinion data dating to the 1960s, this analysis of party choice finds that a valence-based model of political choice supersedes social-class models. The evaluation of the performance of parties and leaders perform a critical role in British politics.
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Clarke, Harold D., David Sanders, Marianne C. Stewart, and Paul F. Whiteley. Performance Politics and the British Voter. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511596872Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A further extension of analysis of performance politics in the British context. This book traces the changing issue agenda of British politics and the continued competition of parties over claims to competence and leadership.
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Fiorina, Morris P. Retrospective Voting in American Elections. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.
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In an important contribution to understanding of political behavior, Fiorina promotes the importance of retrospective voting, based on a “reward-punishment” model. Over time, voters use past experience of a party’s performance to develop expectations about which is most likely to deliver its platform. This model is groundbreaking in suggesting that party identification functions as a “running tally” of accumulated evaluations of party performance and not some irrational affiliation or emotional attachment.
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Green, Jane. “When Voters and Parties Agree: Valence Issues and Party Competition.” Political Studies 55.3 (2007): 629–655.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2007.00671.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A recent analysis of valence politics in the British context, arguing that political competition has become increasingly competence-based due to the convergence of parties around the median voter—narrowing the space for spatial competition and displacing it to valence issues.
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Green, Jane, and Will Jennings. “Macro-Competence: An Analysis of Mood in Party Competence Evaluations in the U.K.” Paper presented at the European Consortium of Political Research, General Conference, September 2009, Potsdam, Germany.
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Examines common variation in competence ratings of political parties across issues, due to individuals’ use of heuristics, cues, and information signals. Authors find that there is a strong “mood” in performance evaluations over time.
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Stokes, Donald E. “Spatial Models of Party Competition.” American Political Science Review 57.2 (1963): 368–377.
DOI: 10.2307/1952828Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The seminal introduction of the idea of “valence” issues in party competition, in contrast to left-right models of spatial politics. Such issues concern matters such as economic growth, on which there is broad agreement, and Stokes notes that the main point of political conflict is over the relative capability of parties to deliver rather than their position on a left-right scale.
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Resources on Public Opinion and Public Policy

Research into representation and dynamic representation in particular is typically data intensive and built upon strong empirical foundations. Dyadic models require an examination of constituency opinion and legislative behavior. Because opinion polls that ask consistent questions about public policy preferences are often national in scope, or otherwise concentrated in a subset of geographical locations, systematic research on dyadic representation often relies on bespoke surveys or data obtained through national election studies. Data on the roll-call activities of legislators must be matched against this and is often compiled. In contrast, dynamic models tend to require time-series data of public opinion and public policy. This can also be data intensive. There are a variety of sources for such studies, both from commercial Pollsters, public archives of poll data such as the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research and the Economic and Social Data Service, election studies, and other academic projects that compile and share data on public opinion and public policy recorded over time (see also citations under Policy Agendas and Public Opinion).

Economic and Social Data Service.
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The UK Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) holds a large collection of economic and social data, in both quantitative and qualitative form, including individual-level survey datasets such as the British Election Study and the British Crime Survey.
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Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.
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The Roper Center is a major archive of social science data, specializing in surveys of public opinion, and it stores more than 15,000 datasets of polls conducted since the 1930s from a range of countries. A large number of these are available for download in portable document format.
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Pollsters

In addition to publicly funded or not-for-profit data services such as the Roper Center and ESDS (cited above under Resources on Public Opinion and Public Policy), which hold data on social and political attitudes, some commercial pollsters such as Gallup in the United States and Ipsos MORI and YouGov in the United Kingdom also report opinion polls and trend data on their public websites. Some services, such as Gallup’s “Brain,” are available by subscription only.

Gallup.
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The Gallup Organization—the world’s oldest pollster, founded by Dr. George Gallup in 1935 as the “American Institute of Public Opinion”—has been polling in the United States since the 1930s and has at various times conducted polling of political attitudes in the United Kingdom, France, Canada, and Australia, among other places.
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Ipsos MORI.
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MORI (Market & Opinion Research International) was originally founded in 1969 by Robert Worcester, and it merged with Ipsos in 2005. It has conducted political polling in the United Kingdom since the 1970s and reports a range of trend data on public attitudes through its website.
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YouGov.
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Founded in 2000, the UK’s first online pollster, YouGov, frequently conducts opinion polls on vote intention, government approval, and other political attitudes. Also has branches in other regions, including North America.
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Election Studies and Public Preferences

Full datasets of public opinion surveys are available through publicly funded election studies such as the American National Election Studies (ANES) in the United States and the British Election Study in Britain, while other sources provide data on public preferences, such as Stimson’s Policy Mood and Degrees of Democracy, or the roll-call activities of legislators, such as Voteview, which reports Poole and Rosenthal’s DW-NOMINATE scores.

American National Election Studies (ANES).
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The ANES is the national survey of voters in the United States, conducted in the lead-up to and after presidential elections. Formally established in 1977 by an NSF grant, its precursors were the Michigan studies dating back to 1948. The survey asks regular items relating to topics such as partisanship and participation.
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British Election Study.
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The British Election Study (BES) has been conducted at every UK general election since 1964. It is an invaluable source of information on political preferences, values, and participation in British politics.
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Degrees of Democracy.
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The Degrees of Democracy project reports all the data used for analyses in Soroka and Wlezien 2010 (see Institutions and Representation)—including data on budgetary spending and public preferences for the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
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Stimson, James A. Policy Mood.
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Stimson’s index of public policy mood for both the United States and the United Kingdom is available on his public website, along with the computer software used to estimate mood (the dyad ratios algorithm).
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Voteview.
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Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal’s DW-Nominate scores, widely used measures of US legislators’ ideological positions over time, are reported on this website.
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Policy Agendas and Public Opinion

The US Policy Agendas Project and the UK Policy Agendas Project both compile data on the policy attention and outputs of governing institutions—including the US Congress and the UK Parliament—as well as reporting data on the issue priorities of the public (typically the “most important problem” or the “most important issue”), dating back to the 1940s. It therefore is possible to examine the link between government and public agendas over time. Similar comparative work is being undertaken as part of the Comparative Policy Agendas Project.

Comparative Policy Agendas Project.
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In a cross-national project on policy, public, and media agendas, using the coding system of the US Policy Agendas Project, scholars from France, the United States, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, the United Kingdom, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Israel, and Spain have classified the policy content of items such as laws and bills, government speeches and orders, public opinion, television and newsprint media, and parliamentary questions to enable analysis of issue attention over time, across institutional and public venues, and across countries.
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UK Policy Agendas Project.
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Using the policy content coding system of the original US Policy Agendas Project, researchers in the United Kingdom have generated a systematic and consistent record of a number of measures of the political and public agenda, some to as far back as 1911, including datasets on the British government’s executive and legislative agenda in the Speech from the Throne, Acts of Parliament, budgetary expenditure, and public opinion about the “most important problem” or “most important issue” facing the country. The UK project is also a member of the Comparative Policy Agendas Project noted below.
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US Policy Agendas Project.
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The Policy Agendas Project, directed by Bryan Jones, Frank Baumgartner, and John Wilkerson, is an ambitious program of data collection and analysis that has generated comparable measures of policy attention in the United States since World War II. The project builds upon Baumgartner and Jones’s policy content coding system and has generated datasets on congressional hearings, media, public opinion, presidential speeches, budgets, congressional bills, and executive orders, among other things.
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Executive Politics and Governance

For some, questions of representation are dominantly linked to elections and political parties, or at least to the organization of public and private interests: the public vote for individual representatives and political parties, who in turn formulate programs and policies that reflect these preferences. Outside this idyllic world of perfect transmission of preferences into outcomes lies executive politics and governance, and the study of bureaucrats, technical and scientific experts, regulators, and the increasingly blurred boundaries between the public and private spheres and between the nation-state and transnational institutions—all of which are features that are central to understanding the functioning of the modern democratic state and the institutional architecture of governance. Theories and empirical studies of executive politics and governance are essential for understanding how officeholders delegate to, and control, bureaucratic agents, how regulation has over time replaced traditional distributive and command activities of the state, and how policy and institutional design can facilitate or obstruct the ability of the public to hold representatives to account. Further, this field of enquiry points toward the changing battleground of political interests and preferences, with the emergences of questions of risk, blame, and policy; the transfer of powers between elected institutions and autonomous authorities with transnational jurisdictions; and creation of risk itself by institutions and by public policies.

Delegation, Regulation, and Accountability

Another important mechanism of representation is the institutional design and architecture of executive politics and governance, through which government is encouraged to act in the public interest, through delegation to autonomous agents (e.g., public agencies, judiciaries, regulators), and through which it is held to account. The changing shape of the modern state points toward changing mechanisms of representation, removed from the world of electoral politics. Across western Europe, governments have retracted from the direct, distributive, and command activities of the postwar era to regulatory modes of governance (see Majone 1994 and Moran 2003). Regulatory politics has long been of importance in the United States (see Wood and Waterman 1994 and Carpenter 2001). Some of the motivations for delegation to these independent agencies align with representation of the public interest, such as attempts to overcome information asymmetries or to handle complex technical and scientific issues, whereas others are designed with an eye toward blame-shifting; see Hood 2002 for an examination of the links between delegation and blame. The changing shape of modern government has therefore seen it turn regulation in on itself (Hood, et al. 1999; Behn 2001). Further, the increased use of delegation raises the age-old question of how political principals can best secure control over their bureaucratic agents. In this regard, Hood 1995 explores cultural variations of the tools of bureaucratic control, while McCubbins and Schwartz 1984 argues that Congress prefers hands-off control through administrative rules and procedures (“fire alarms”) rather than direct oversight through committees (“police patrols”).

Behn, Robert D. Rethinking Democratic Accountability. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2001.
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This book reflects upon different understandings of “accountability” before proceeding to consider its consequences for public administration, and in particular the connection between the rise of the “new public management” paradigm and stress upon the accountability and performance of government. Behn seeks to explain the tensions between empowering officials with discretion in the name of performance while also enforcing strict formal procedures to ensure bureaucracy is accountable.
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Carpenter, Daniel. The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
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An impressive historical analysis of the origins of bureaucratic institutions in the United States, this work examines the role of networks and the entrepreneurship of officials in enabling federal agencies to secure autonomy from political control and expand their activities.
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Hood, Christopher. “Control Over Bureaucracy: Cultural Theory and Institutional Variety.” Journal of Public Policy 15.3 (1995): 207–230.
DOI: 10.1017/S0143814X00010023Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A conceptually motivated article that applies grid-group cultural theory to generate a general categorization of approaches to control over public administration (contrived randomness, competition, mutuality, and review). These polar types are used to illustrate the self-disequilibrating dynamics of such control systems due to side effects and resistance. The analysis provides a cautionary tale for those interested in the design of mechanisms for control over bureaucracy.
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Hood, Christopher. “The Risk Game and the Blame Game.” Government and Opposition 37.1 (2002): 15–37.
DOI: 10.1111/1477-7053.00085Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Hood provides a typically unique and insightful analysis of the connection between the regulation of risk and the blame avoidance behavior of elected officials, distinguishing between the use of policy strategies, institutional design, and presentational tactics for deflecting blame.
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Hood, Christopher, Colin Scott, Oliver James, George Jones, and Tony Travers. Regulation Inside Government: Waste Watchers, Quality Police, and Sleaze-Busters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
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A study of the growth of regulation and internal controls within British government, this work complements accounts of the rise of the regulatory state in illustrating that the state is increasingly turning regulation in on itself.
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Majone, Giandomenico. “The Rise of the Regulatory State in Europe.” West European Politics 17.3 (1994): 77–101.
DOI: 10.1080/01402389408425031Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Seminal article on the changing nature of the state in European democracies. Majone argues that privatization and deregulation have contributed to the emergence of a regulatory state—as there has been a retrenchment of the direct interventionism of the old state (characterized by public ownership, planning, and centralized administration).
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McCubbins, Matthew D., and Thomas Schwartz. “Congressional Oversight Overlooked: Police Patrols versus Fire Alarms.” American Journal of Political Science 28.1 (1984): 165–179.
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In response to claims of the failings of Congress in its oversight of the executive branch, McCubbins and Schwartz argue that this reflects a preference for a particular mode of oversight (“fire alarms”) over another (“police patrols”). The creation of a decentralized institutional system in which it is possible for citizens and groups to inspect the activities of agencies, and to raise challenges and promote action, frees Congress from direct intervention and allows it to focus on responsiveness.
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Moran, Michael. The British Regulatory State: High Modernism and Hyper-Innovation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
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This is both an impressive historical account of the changing nature of the modern British state that evolved out of Victorian institutions of government and an insightful diagnosis of contradictions of the regulatory state in an era of high modernism, with its centralizing and grand engineering ambitions (highlighted in particular by the recent global financial crisis).
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Wood, B. Dan, and Richard W. Waterman. Bureaucratic Dynamics: The Role of Bureaucracy in a Democracy. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994.
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In an analysis of the enforcement of regulatory policies in the United States by eight federal agencies, Wood and Waterman use principal-agent theory to explore the responsiveness of bureaucrats both to public preferences and to elected officeholders. They take particular interest in political control of bureaucracy through a range of instruments, such as budget allocations and agency appointments.
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Policy, Institutions, and Blame Avoidance

Another factor affecting the representation of interests and preferences in government is how blame-avoiding behavior affects the behavior of officeholders and shapes public organizations, as well as their operating procedures (see Hood 2010). The concern with blame avoidance, highlighted by Weaver 1986, reflects more general negativity effects that afflict political behavior (Lau 1985) and distorts the behavior of officeholders and their decision making. Weaver observed that policymakers increasingly replaced discretionary controls with automatic mechanisms, such as the indexation of budgets. This suggested the principal motivation of officeholders was to avoid blame rather than claim the credit for popular programs. To understand mechanisms of representation, then, it is essential to understand how logics of blame avoidance affect the behavior of government. Hood 2002 (cited under Delegation, Regulation, and Accountability) makes the distinction between policy, agency, and presentational approaches to blame avoidance. Decision makers can attempt to avoid blame through the design of low-risk policies, shift responsibility into other institutional settings (such as the processes of delegation noted above), or present rhetorical arguments to defend their actions when things go wrong—the event that inspires most studies of blame avoidance (see Bovens, et al. 1999). Studies in the welfare state literature use blame avoidance to explain patterns of retrenchment, see the analyses of Pierson 1994 and Lindbom 2007 for example.

Bovens, Mark, Paul ’t Hart, Sander Dekker, and Gerdien Verheuvel. “The Politics of Blame Avoidance: Defensive Tactics in a Dutch Crime-Fighting Fiasco.” In When Things Go Wrong: Organizational Failures and Breakdowns. Edited by Helmut K. Anheier, 123–148. London: SAGE, 1999.
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This book chapter offers an analysis of the political construction of policy fiascos, grounded in the literature on crisis management. The process of fiasco construction, through which some issues gain widespread traction as crises and others remain ignored, is traced through four distinct dimensions: the assessment of events, identification of agents, explanation of behavior, and evaluation of behavior.
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Hood, Christopher. The Blame Game: Spin, Bureaucracy, and Self-Preservation in Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
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In an important contribution to the growing literature on blame avoidance, Hood explains how blame avoidance shapes the organization of government and public services. This includes the design of institutions, the formation of routine frontline operations, and the use of presentational tactics to deflect blame.
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Lau, Richard R. “Two Explanations for Negativity Effects in Political Behaviour.” American Journal of Political Science 29.1 (1985): 119–138.
DOI: 10.2307/2111215Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A study of negativity effects in the evaluation of political figures, where greater weight is given to negative information than positive information.
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Lindbom, Anders. “Obfuscating Retrenchment: Swedish Welfare Policy in the 1990s.” Journal of Public Policy 27.2 (2007): 129–150.
DOI: 10.1017/S0143814X07000645Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A study of retrenchment of transfer programs in Sweden, finding that larger cutbacks were inflicted on non-indexed programs because they are less transparent and vulnerable to obfuscation. The logic of blame avoidance is identified as the source of this pattern.
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Pierson, Paul. Dismantling the Welfare State: Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
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An insightful analysis of the politics of welfare state retrenchment in an era of austerity. Pierson considers the survival of social policies under the administrations of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. He argues that retrenchment is an exercise in blame avoidance, as policymakers seek to avoid blame rather than claim credit.
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Weaver, R. Kent. “The Politics of Blame Avoidance.” Journal of Public Policy 6.4 (1986): 371–398.
DOI: 10.1017/S0143814X00004219Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Seminal article that introduces the idea of blame avoidance in political science. Weaver argues that officeholders are more concerned with the avoidance of blame than the claiming of credit, shaping the strategies adopted by officeholders. This is linked to negativity bias.
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Governance of Risk

While much of the discussion of mechanisms of representation focuses upon electoral design and political institutions, modern government is often required to grapple with questions of risk. The governance of risk is central to issues as diverse as the safety of nuclear power, environmental dangers, terrorism, genetic modification of foods, and workplace health and safety. The influential social theorists Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck have argued that societies, economies, and governments are increasingly organized in response to risk (Giddens 1991, Beck 1992). Further, risk has become a critical organizing concept, both in government (O’Malley 2004) and in corporate entities searching for internal control and external legitimacy (Power 2007). The cultural selection of risks for attention in public policy has been emphasized for some time in responses to societal harms and environmental dangers (Douglas and Wildavksy 1982). Risk is essential to the question of who gets what, when, and how, but it has often been the domain of social and legal theorists rather than political science. Yet social and political conflict, and therefore representation, is inherently organized around the distribution of exposure to threats and hazards. Regulation of risk must reconcile political and social pressures with scientific and technological advice (Breyer 1993, Sunstein 2003). The public management of risk must grapple with “wicked problems” in the trade-offs and blind spots inherent to the regulation of risk (Lodge 2009). Hood, et al. 2001 finds that variation in risk regulation regimes reflects pressures of market failure, public opinion, and organized interests, as well as concerns with mitigating blame in the event of failures of governance. While risk is far removed from representation through election, it is an increasing dimension of political conflict.

Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Translated by Mark Ritter. London: SAGE, 1992.
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Beck’s “risk society” is a seminal intervention on the increasing organization of states and societies in response to risks. It is argued that societal risks are manufactured through processes of economic growth, globalization, and scientific and technological progress, as the balance of risk has shifted from the natural world toward manmade dangers.
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Breyer, Stephen G. Breaking the Vicious Circle: Toward Effective Risk Regulation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
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An analysis of the regulation of environmental and health risks, focused on the United States. Breyer highlights anomalies and paradoxes of risk regulation in tensions between science and law, noting that some low risks are subject to strict regulation while other dangers remain unregulated.
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Douglas, Mary, and Aaron B. Wildavsky. Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technical and Environmental Dangers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
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An important contribution on the cultural selection of risks for attention. Douglas and Wildavsky seek to understand political conflict over societal risks, such as air pollution and nuclear power in the United States. The book develops Douglas’s cultural theory, where different worldviews are related to different approaches to risk taking and risk aversion, and shape demand for different approaches to regulation and control.
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Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991.
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A major contribution in the influential role of risk in modern society, and in government, as the concept of risk brings with it a search for control and safety. Giddens provides important insights on the rise of risk within public and private institutions and on its consequences for public policy.
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Hood, Christopher, Henry Rothstein, and Robert Baldwin. The Government of Risk: Understanding Risk Regulation Regimes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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Hood, Rothstein, and Baldwin’s contribution to the literature on risk is notable for its introduction of risk regulation “regimes” as a theoretical framework for the systematic comparative analysis of regulation across domains. They presents an in-depth empirical study of risk regulation across nine regimes, seeking to explain variation according to factors such as public opinion, media attention, and interest groups.
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Lodge, Martin. “The Public Management of Risk: The Case for Deliberating among Worldviews.” Review of Policy Research 26.4 (2009): 395–408.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1541-1338.2009.00391.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An article that explores the “wicked issue” of public management of risk in the age of the regulatory state. Lodge argues that the design of regulatory systems account for “black-spots” and trade-offs between risk and regulation.
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O’Malley, Pat. Risk, Uncertainty and Government. London: Glass House Press, 2004.
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Examines the role of risk and uncertainty in government and policymaking, encompassing domains such as crime and social security.
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Power, Michael. Organized Uncertainty: Designing a World of Risk Management. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
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An important account of the rise of internal controls and risk management in private institutions. Power observes a world in which organizations are increasingly being turned “inside out” in response to pressure for transparency and accountability, fuelled by failures in corporate governance such as the collapse of Enron.
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Sunstein, Cass R. Risk and Reason: Safety, Law, and the Environment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University of Press, 2003.
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Another important intervention on the debate over risk regulation. Sunstein explores the irrationalities of systems of risk regulation, advocating the “cost-benefit state” as a solution.
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