Election and party system effects on policy representation: Bringing time into a comparative perspective

Public policy is supposed under democracy to be necessarily linked to popular preferences through elections. Election outcomes are however shaped not only by the votes cast but also by the party-policy options on offer and the rules by which votes are aggregated into seats. A crucial question is whether rules exert their influence through the party system they help shape or whether public policy is directly affected by them. We examine these points here over the post-war period with evidence on policy preferences at electoral and governmental levels in 21 countries. Under single member constituency systems (SMD), election rules and party systems have independent and equal effects on short run representation, while under PR it is the party systems which produce (limited) distortion. Over time however SMD itself emerges as the main source of representational bias in the countries where it operates, with little bias under PR from either election or party systems.