Electoral Majorities, Political Parties, and Collective Representation

In practice, democracies privilege plurality parties. Theories of the democratic process challenge the democratic credentials of this practice. Abstract social choice theory wonders whether an electoral majority even exists. A more optimistic line of argument, prominent in research on collective representation, assumes that the policy position of the median voter embodies the majority electoral preference. The conflict between what democracies actually do and what two leading theories of the democratic process say calls for a comparative inquiry into electoral majoritarianism. For each of a dozen countries, the authors ask whether any political party commands a predominant majoritarian position among voters—that is, is a Condorcet winner—and, if so, which party it is. They find that a Condorcet winning party exists in all 12 countries and that the plurality party can lay more claim to representing the popular majority than the left—right median party. These findings have important implications for the study of democratic representation, which the authors consider in their conclusions.