Degrees of Democracy

Stuart N. Soroka is associate professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec. He is also Adjunct Professor and Director of the Canadian Opinion Research Archive at the School of Policy Studies at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, and co-director of the Media Observatory at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. He is the author of Agenda-Setting Dynamics in Canada (2002) and a number of articles in journals including the Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, the Canadian Journal of Political Science, and Comparative Political Studies. Christopher Wlezien is Professor of Political Science and Faculty Affiliate in the Institute for Public Affairs at Temple University. He previously was on the faculty at Oxford University, where he was Reader of Comparative Government and a Fellow of Nuffield College. While at Oxford, he co-founded the ESRC-funded Oxford Spring School in Quantitative Methods for Social Research. Prior to Oxford, he taught at the University of Houston, where he was founding director of the Institute for the Study of Political Economy. His articles have appeared in several collections, including Britain Votes and The Future of Election Studies, as well as journals including the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, and the Canadian Journal of Political Science.

• Preface; 1. Public opinion and policy in representative democracy; 2. The thermostatic model; 3. Adding issues and institutions; 4. Public preferences and spending - a preliminary analysis; 5. Parameters of public responsiveness; 6. Public responsiveness explored; 7. Policy representation; 8. Homogeneity and heterogeneity in public and policy responsiveness; 9. Responsiveness and representation.

'This extraordinary book sets out to describe and test a mechanism by which government policy might respond to changes in the preferences of citizens, and citizens might adjust their preferences in light of the policies that governments enact. In the process it investigates the preconditions for efficient working of representative democracy. The authors have meticulously collected the data needed to evaluate the efficiency of representation in three countries – the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom – and have devised rigorous tests that employ these data. The results not only tell us how democracy works but also how well it works in these three countries, providing major insights regarding the impact of institutional differences on representation processes.' Mark Franklin, European University Institute