Policy-based Voting and the Type of Democracy

This chapter examines whether various features of what Lijphart called consensus democracy, such as proportional representation, multiparty systems, and coalition governments promote party–voter linkages based on policy and ideology, either in an absolute sense or relative to accountability for performance in office. The chapter reviews the possible causal mechanisms that may generate the expected relationship between type of democracy and whether performance evaluations or ideological proximity dominate voting behaviour. Empirically, the chapter uses two-step multilevel models to examine the link between ideological proximity-based voting and key dimensions of political institutional variation across types of democracy, using behavioural indicators that address the endogeneity of political attitudes to partisanship as well as issues in comparability across two-party and multiparty systems. As expected, the chapter finds an ambiguous but very weak relationship between type of democracy and incidence of ideological proximity-based voting and highlight the relatively independent development of ideological polarization from type of democracy.