Ideological beasts or effective organizations? Do voters’ views of democracy affect their expectations of political parties?

Abstract

While the functions of political parties have been extensively defined in the political science literature, it is still an open question whether citizens attribute the same roles to parties. Established theories of parties emphasize their linkage functions geared towards representation or effectiveness. This article investigates where citizens locate parties within these perspectives and whether their understanding of party functions is connected to their democratic values, preference for democratic institutions, and evaluations of the democratic systems. We base our exploratory investigation on original data from a survey run in the UK and Australia in 2020, which includes novel survey instruments measuring citizens’ preferences for party behaviour. The findings show that citizens rate both representation and effectiveness highly and that their preferences are unrelated to their support for democracy. Significant effects of preferences for representative vs direct democracy and the evaluation of their country’s democracy indicate that dissatisfied citizens are more likely to value representation. Importantly, we identify a large group of respondents who cannot choose between representation and effectiveness, which has theoretical and measurement implications.

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