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Questions in the 2003 Scottish Social Attitudes Survey were used to compare Islamophobia with four other Scottish phobias: sectarianism (primarily anti-Catholic), and phobias about Europe, Asylum seekers, and ‘the auld enemy’(England). Social factors affected all phobias the same way, but political factors discriminated. Conservative voters scored low on Anglophobia but high on every other phobia; SNP voters scored high on Anglophobia but not on other phobias. This suggested that Anglophobia itself displaced Islamophobia by providing another target, and that England itself helped reduce within-Scotland phobias by providing Scots with a common, external and very significant ‘other’. Scotland is too small, too peripheral, and too insignificant to play a corresponding role in displacing phobias within England. However, by stimulating English nationalism without providing a truly significant ‘other’, Scottish nationalism may actually increase Islamophobia in England, but not in Scotland.

This chapter examines the social and demographic profiles as well as the political attitudes of Liberal Democrat party members, drawing upon an earlier study of Liberal Democrat party to identify changes in their profiles during the 1990s. Comparisons are made between the social backgrounds of party members and those of Liberal Democrat voters to determine what differences, if any, exist between the two types of party supporters. Activism within the party and whether there is any evidence of a decline in participation in recent years are analyzed. The evidence suggests that while many party members are active, there has been a decline in party activism over time and a weakening of the ties between the party and its members.

Chapter 6 addresses a third prevalent issue regarding presidential elections—the extent to which direct elections strengthen democratic practices. Empirical analyses using global and European samples of parliamentary systems with elected heads of state demonstrate that citizens' satisfaction with government, political disillusionment, their commitment to democratic values and level of political involvement are not significantly affected by introducing direct presidential elections. In fact, the additional election increases voter fatigue and decreases turnout in parliamentary elections by about seven percentage points. Since direct presidential elections are no more likely to decrease citizen disillusionment with the government and strengthen democratic practices than indirect elections, this chapter concludes that these systems have indistinguishable effects on democratic attitudes. The noticeable effect of introducing additional elections on voter behavior, however, merits the attention of institutional designers.

Shows how Bayesian thinking should make democratic outcomes so rationally compelling. Bayes's formula provides a mathematical expression for specifying exactly how we ought rationally to update our a priori beliefs in light of subsequent evidence, and the proposal is that voters are modelled in like fashion: votes, let us suppose, constitute (among other things) ‘reports’ of the voter's experiences and perceptions; further suppose that voters accord ‘evidentiary value’ to the reports they receive from one another through those votes; and further suppose that voters are rational, and that part and parcel of their being rational is being prepared to revise their opinions in light of further evidence (including evidence emanating from one another's votes‐cum‐reports). In this process, each of us treats our own experiences and perceptions as one source of evidence, and regards our own report as right; in that sense, we are perfectly sincere when we vote in a particular way, although we also acknowledge that our own experiences and perspectives are particular and peculiar, and hence our own perceptions are themselves inconclusive; because of that, voters striving to behave rationally should sincerely want to adjust their a priori beliefs in the light of all other experiences and perceptions that are reported at an election. Bayesian updating of that sort may well lead people who started out believing (and voting) one way to end up believing (and genuinely wanting implemented) the opposite way, just so long as sufficiently many votes‐cum‐reports point in that different direction; in other words, Bayesian reasoning can, and in politically typical cases ought to, provide people with a compelling reason to accede to the majority verdict. In this way, Bayesianism ‘rationalizes’ majority rule in a pretty strong sense; indeed if anything, it underwrites majoritarianism too strongly.

The more important levels have fewer positions, and the share of minorities goes down. The law of minority attrition is a quantitatively predictive logical model that expresses it more precisely. A party with a small share of seats gets an even smaller share of seats, and the precise figure depends on assembly size and the total number of voters. The law of minority attrition might also help determine which part of the ‘rubber ceiling’ on women's advancement is natural and which part is socially imposed.

This chapter explores public attitudes towards representation in the EU. A review of existing evidence about public attitudes to the EU and the integration process suggests not only widespread public ignorance about the EU, but also growing levels of public suspicion and hostility in recent years. Drawing on Eurobarometer data, it is argued that notwithstanding their low levels of knowledge about the EP, voters across the EU seem to have reasonably clear and common preferences as to what they want from their European-level representatives. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of these findings for the chapters to follow.

The median voter theorem states that political parties will move to the electoral centre to maximise their vote. This theorem has been routinely linked to Downs and An Economic Theory of Democracy. It is argued that Downs’ determination to develop a theory to predict party behaviour has led him to develop a spatial framework in a misleading way. It is further argued that the electoral centre can be on the political right, left, or centre.

This chapter investigates the electoral representation of the integration issues, assuming that the shift in the location of institutional power related to European integration may be accompanied by a corresponding change in the direction of the efforts of mass politics. It documents the extent to which European issues differentiate the attitudes of voters and parties alike. It argues that the attitudes of national and European parties, of political elites, and public opinion towards the constitutive issues of integration are hard to interpret, referring to historical cleavages or to a left-right dimension. It interprets the Europarties development as a top-down attempt by political elites to institutionalize an isomorphic party system at the EU level that tends to select those nation-like issues on which a structuring easier. It discusses the strong collusive push of both national and European parties towards constitutive EU issues in which their divisions appear insurmountable and would undermine their effective existence. The current situation witnesses an imbalance between the lack of party system structuring at the EU level and the growing potential for party system destructuring at the national level. If EU-related latent oppositions were to be politicized, the resulting alignments will not closely correspond with the political divisions on which domestic politics has traditionally been founded.

Political variables (median voter and median parliamentary, government and ministry positions) change more radically and more quickly than policy outputs. This accounts for the lack of relationships previous studies have failed to find as we did, too, in chapters 8 and 9, between political changes and policy. However, political forces oscillate round stable equilibrium positions, which show a strong relationship to the policy regimes’ equilibria previously uncovered. In the long term, the responsiveness of the median parliamentary position to the median voter position is high, as is government position to MPP, and ministries to government position.

This chapter clinches the previous analysis by linking equilibria on both sides, (politics and policy) showing that they correspond closely. Broadly speaking, political preferences are transmitted from median voter to median parliamentary party, from that to government, and then to ministries in the sequence postulated by the median mandate. This implies that under the froth and change of politics, certain stable processes continue, and these are in conformity with a median mandate interpretation of democratic processes.

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).

For democracy to work, politicians and electors have to see the world in the same party–related terms. Evidence is cited from both surveys and party programmes to show this must be the Left–Right dimension. However, issues get squeezed into this only during and round about elections. In inter–election periods, ministerial and procedural structures may well divide political issues up into separable domains, raising the possibility that different parliamentary medians exist, depending on the subject under discussion. This possibility has to be built into our research design.

This chapter describes the data and the way thse are deployed operationally in the subsequent analysis. The data falls into three main categories: aggregate voting results for post-war national elections over 21 democracies with the resulting distribution of seats in parliaments and places in cabinets; policy preferences stated by all significant parties in each election in their published policy programme (their manifesto or platform); party policy preferences can also be weighted if they are in government by their share of cabinet seats. The research questions asked with these data are how far policy outputs compare with preferences on an election-to-election and government-to-government basis. More importantly, how policy relationships evolve over time canbe examined, and equilibria both for policy and preferences can be established and compared.

The government mandate in its full form fails descriptively because few spontaneous majorities form in support of one party, and there is no guarantee that the plurality party is not actually opposed by most electors. A minimal version might still apply however in terms of retrospective voting — a majority might still vote against a government. This idea has been particularly prominent in the economic voting literature, This chapter examines the evidence for ‘economic’ voting. It confirms previous comparative research by showing there is only limited evidence of consistent effects from growth, unemployment and inflation on voting. This is explained in terms of electoral reactions to any set of economic conditions never being undifferentiated or unproblematic. As there is always some rational argument for voting against incumbents some electors will always do so, accounting for a general fall of incumbent votes towards their long term norm. Median voter positions are not predictable from the state of the economy, but they do match government positions over the long term and indeed provide the equilibrium towards which government policy tends.

This chapter performs a static analysis of correspondences between median voter, Parliamentary median, and government preferences by individual government and election. Distortions are widespread but more evident under SMD than PR systems — which are of course designed to produce a ‘necessary’ correspondence between the median voter and the median party in Parliament. However, distortions at each stage (voter-Parliament, Parliament-government) and over time cancel each other out so long-term representational bias is limited.