A close connection between public opinion and policy is considered a vital element of democracy. In representative systems, elections are assumed to play a role in realising such congruence. If those who participate in elections are not representative of the public at large, it follows that the reliance on elections as a mechanism of representation entails a risk of unequal representation. In this paper, we evaluate whether voters are better represented by means of an analysis of policy responsiveness to voters and citizens in democracies worldwide. We construct a uniquely comprehensive dataset that includes measures of citizens’ and voters’ ideological (left–right) positions, and data on welfare spending in Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries since 1980. We find evidence of policy responsiveness to voters, but not to the public at large. Since additional tests suggest that the mechanism of electoral turnout does not cause this voter‐policy responsiveness, we outline alternate mechanisms to test in future research.

Political parties face a crucial trade-off between electoral and partisan goals: should they put electoral goals first, pursuing the policies they think will win them the most votes in the next election, or should they put partisan goals first, pursuing the policies their members, activists, and most loyal voters prefer? In this paper we argue that main political parties make different choices depending on the information environment they are in. They have strong incentives to follow the median voter when the median voter's position is well known, but when there is more uncertainty they have strong incentives to adopt policies they prefer for partisan reasons, since uncertainty makes party leaders more willing to bet that the party's preferred policies are also vote winners. We develop an empirical analysis of how the main parties on the left and the right in twenty democracies have changed their platforms from election to election since the 1960s.

This study explains redistribution and income inequality by revisiting traditional approaches. The predictions of the two dominant theories, the median voter hypothesis (the Meltzer–Richard model) and the power resources theory are regarded as contrasting, and have seldom been incorporated under a single framework. I develop a composite model of inequality by combining their core arguments within the framework of party competition. This study also analyses stages of inequality formation, namely market wage inequality and redistribution, and adds in a dynamic component to the model, completing the cycle of income distribution. The model is supported empirically with data from 18 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries from 1970 to 2009. I demonstrate the joint relevance and significance of the two theories, showing that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive and should be properly addressed from both theoretical perspectives.

Since 1990 the age of the average OECD median voter has increased three times faster than in the preceding 30 years. We use panel data from 1980–2002 to investigate the effects of population aging on both the program size and the benefit generosity of public pensions in 18 OECD countries. Population aging is accompanied by cutting smaller slices out of larger cakes: it increases aggregate spending on pensions but freezes or decreases the generosity of individual benefits. Controlling for political, institutional and time-period effects, we find that public pension efforts are significantly mediated by welfare regime type. Moreover, since the late 1980s pension effort has more fully adopted a retrenchment logic. It is the politics of fiscal and electoral straitjackets, not gerontocracy, which shape public pension spending today. While population aging is accelerating, contrary to alarmist political economy predictions democracies are not yet dominated by a new distributive politics of elderly power.

Bien qu'il est généralement admis en économie publique que le fossé quisépare l'approche positive des choix publics et leur approche normativeimplique l'existence de possibles pareto améliorations dans les choix enmatiere de dépense publique, il semble que l'économiste manque d'outilsadéquats pour déterminer la réelle importance de ces possiblesaméliorations. Le présent article vise à combler, en partie, le manque etmet plus particulierement l'accent sur les inefficacités coût dans laproduction de biens et services publics locaux. En effet, ces inefficacitésétant indubitablement des inefficacités paretiennes, elles sontnécessairement à l'origine d'un gaspillage des ressources fiscales. Uneméthode paramétrique fondée sur l'application du concept économétrique defrontière stochastique au concept microéconomique de fonction d'utilité enéquivalent monétaire est développée puis appliquée dans le contexte dumodèle bien connu de l'electeur médian. Une mise œuvre à partir de donnéessur les communes françaises est finalement proposée.