Assessing the Degree of Political Responsiveness in Contemporary Democracies. The Complex Relationship between Government Alternation and Ideological Congruence

Responsiveness, one of the key elements of representative democracy, implies that preferences of the government converge to some extent toward the preferences of the citizens, and in particular of the median voter. A broad literature investigated the institutional determinants of ideological congruence focusing on the classical distinction between the majoritarian and the proportional visions of democracy (Powell 2000). Nevertheless, it provided contradictory results. While most of the literature showed a better performance of proportional systems, more recent studies demonstrated that there is no significant difference between this two patterns of democracy. The present paper goes beyond this distinction analysing the role played by government alternation, a phenomenon usually neglected by the literature. I postulate that the effects of alternation on ideological congruence are different according to the concept of alternation adopted and the time frame considered. While the possibility of alternation, determined by the institutional design present in a country has no significant effects on congruence, the actual levels of alternation play a contradictory role. At the single electoral moments the occurrence of an alternation increases the distance between the median voter and the government preferences. On the contrary, in the long-run the level of alternation cumulated over time contributes to reduce the average level of ideological distortion compensating distortions in one direction with distortions in the other. The positions of the median voters and the governments are estimated through the Comparative Manifesto Project data and the three research hypotheses are tested on a sample of thirty two countries including both consolidated and newly established democracies. Empirical results obtained confirm all the hypotheses advanced. In the long-run government alternation plays a positive role on responsiveness not because it leads to a an alignment between the position of the median voter and the government, but rather because it permits various parties to govern in turn satisfying different sectors of the society.