2 - Our Solutions to the Challenges of Studying the Chain of Representation

Summary

Studying the relationships among citizens' preferences, policy-makers' preferences, and policy orientations poses many challenges, and this chapter outlines how we chose to meet those challenges. We discuss our measures of each and how we intend to use them to capture one-to-one, many-to-many, and many-to-one congruence and responsiveness at different stages in the chain of representation. We also make the case for why it is vital that all these concepts be measured on a common scale, and we give a brief preview of how we intend to do that. We also provide an overview of the features of electoral systems and policy-making processes that we will aggregate or cluster in order to summarize their incentives for providing congruence and responsiveness. We conclude the chapter by setting our work in the context of important related works that do not exactly set out to tackle the questions we will tackle here.