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The argument of Chapter One is spelled out in more detail in terms of propositional tables and accompanying discussion. These show the considerable overlap in the conditions for any mandate to exist, and the fact that the Government Mandate is a special case of the Median Mandate. The tables on voting and governments show that spontaneous majorities, essential to the Government Mandate, rarely form, while correspondences between median voter and median party in Parliament are quite common (three quarters of all governments).

This chapter considers how the policy positions offered by candidates influence voter turnout. It expects that larger differences in the policy positions of candidates are associated with a higher probability of voting. Using the American National Election Studies data, it examines the impact of individuals' perceptions of candidates' policy positions—how they compare to each other, and how they compare to the individuals' preferences—on individuals' decisions to vote. It finds that individuals are more likely to vote when they perceive a greater policy difference between the candidates. The poorest Americans have also become more indifferent between candidates in recent elections—that is, they see fewer differences between candidates now when compared to wealthier Americans.

This chapter presents a theory of candidate positioning. The key to this account is the policy reputations of the two political parties. Candidates must take positions consistent with the policy reputations of their parties to collect a reputational premium. The chapter's job is twofold. The first task is to demonstrate that programmatic party identifiers favor candidates of their party on the grounds that they represent the overall outlook of their party, independent of the specific policy positions that the candidates take. The second task is to specify the range of positions that a candidate may take and still be judged to represent the overall outlook of the party by supporters of his party who know and share its outlook.

This chapter examines psychologists’ career-long policy journeys. The first section of the chapter centers on psychologists’ multiple policy involvements during the course of their careers, with specific focus on the nature of these multiple involvements. Six characteristics of these involvements are described. The second section of the chapter focuses on three distinctive aspects of a policy career that interviewees highlight as particularly important for the field moving forward. The importance of these aspects resides in their respective contributions to expanding the quality, effectiveness, and scope of policy influence. The three distinctive aspects are interdisciplinary collaboration, policy-related leadership positions, and international policy involvement.

The institutional diversity of English higher education has given rise to, and in turn helped to intensify, a more open and pluralist politics of higher education in England. The first empirical section of the chapter analyses Universities UK (UUK) because it can be described as the main body claiming to represent the interests of the higher education sector as a whole. It then examines what it describes as ‘the mission groups’: GuildHE, Russell Group, 1994 Group, Million+, and the University Alliance. The endeavour is to present profiles of these groups and analyse their policy positions with respect to four key issues: research funding, the regulation of higher education, the widening of access, and the introduction of variable student fees. It evaluates their relative political effectiveness and posits the question as to whether their purpose is more to define their institutional identifies rather than to influence the direction of policy.

This chapter examines the effect of TV debates on political knowledge conditioned by the media context. We argue that TV debates take place in a wider media context and the extent of citizens’ learning processes about issue positions depends also on the informational context in general. We test four hypotheses: while the first three hypotheses concern the conditional impact of media issue coverage and debate content, the last hypothesis addresses the differences between incumbent and challenger. Using media content analyses and panel survey data, our results confirm the hypotheses that (1) when an issue is addressed in a TV debate, viewers tend to develop a perception of the parties’ positions on this issue, but (2) only if this issue has not been addressed extensively in the media beforehand. This learning effect about parties’ positions is bigger for the opposition party.

The concluding chapter begins by summarizing and discussing the insights that this book has generated. It has addressed three aspects that have received scant attention in existing research: The importance of analyzing the Eurozone crisis in comparative perspective, the importance of examining the whole range of policy options, including the ones not chosen, and the importance of analyzing crisis politics not just in deficit-debtor, but also in surplus-creditor countries. Because the bulk of the book’s analyses have focused on domestic distributive struggles, the concluding chapter turns to the question to what extent the book’s approach is useful for understanding the distributive struggles on the European level as well. For this purpose, the chapter examines how surplus and deficit states positioned themselves with regard to the core EMU-related issues and reforms that were discussed in the European Council during the Eurozone crisis. The analysis shows that on policy issues related to questions of adjustment and financing, deficit and surplus countries aligned in opposing camps. Moreover, creditor-surplus countries managed to secure policy decisions in line with their preferences on almost all adjustment-related policy issues. This meant that deficit countries had to carry the bulk of the adjustment burden. In contrast, surplus countries showed more willingness to compromise on issues related to financing. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the policy implications of the findings and offers an agenda for future research.

This chapter explores in detail how perceptions of presidents and presidential candidates’ ideological and policy positions affect perceptions of their parties’ positions on these same dimensions. Their influence is pervasive and remarkably consistent over time, across dimensions, and among partisans. Although Americans have clear priors regarding where the parties stand on individual issues as well their location on the general left-right dimension, they adjust their beliefs according to where they place the current president or presidential candidates. The evidence comes from the ANES time series as well ANES and Cooperative Congressional Elections Studies panel studies in which respondents were asked to place themselves, the parties, and the president or presidential candidates on seven-point liberal-conservative scale and comparable scales regarding the extent of government responsibility for providing jobs and a good standard of living, the tradeoff between government spending and services, the extent of government aid to blacks, the level of defense spending, and women’s role in society. Ordinary Democrats and Republicans have developed divergent notions of where the Democratic Party and its presidents lie on the left-right spectrum, but regardless of partisanship, presidents strongly and consistently influence where people locate their parties in ideological and policy space.

This chapter discusses how over the last decades, not only have mainstream parties become more similar to one another organizationally, they have also become more similar politically. On the one hand, their policy positions have tended to converge (not necessarily toward the electoral median) and they have devoted less attention to the questions that traditionally have defined the left/right axis in politics. On the other hand, they devote more attention to questions of honesty and managerial competence. It is noted that the mainstream parties have also become more flexible and promiscuous when faced with the matter of choosing a coalition partner.