L'article évalue l’état de la représentation substantive des femmes, des individus moins éduqués, moins fortunés, des jeunes ainsi que des allophones en politique provinciale québécoise. La représentation des citoyen(ne)s par les partis politiques est conceptualisée selon trois types de congruence idéologique: 1) le parti étant idéologiquement le plus proche des citoyen(ne)s; 2) le parti pour lequel les citoyen(ne)s ont voté; et 3) le système partisan. Nous évaluons ces formes de représentation face à cinq dimensions structurant la politique québécoise, permettant ainsi une approche multidimensionnelle à la représentation : l'axe souverainiste-fédéraliste, l'axe gauche-droite, les dépenses sociales, les dépenses en environnement, ainsi que l'immigration. Nos résultats présentent un portrait complexe de la représentation. Bien que certains groupes apparaissent moins bien représentés (en particulier, les femmes et les individus moins éduqués) aucun groupe ne l'est de façon systématique, et certains groupes sont parfois même avantagés (en particulier, les jeunes).

The received wisdom on executive–legislative relations in multiparty presidential systems is that the size of the president's majority in Congress is the key factor explaining governance patterns, particularly the president's legislative success. However, in many cases presidents enjoying a nominal majority have been unable to pass legislation and have faced institutional instability. The article departs from a conventional definition of divided government and focuses on the preference incongruence between the governing coalition and the floor of Congress. It argues that the ideological distance between the floor and the coalition is a key factor explaining the president's cost of governing (which includes factors such as the distribution of cabinet portfolios and budgetary transfers to coalition partners). The article provides an empirical test with data from Brazil that find that the greater the ideological incongruence, the higher the cost of governing for the president.

As scholars explore opportunities for democratic renewal, the potential of ballot structures to improve the quality of representation has been largely neglected. We argue that expressive ballots can improve the congruence of political preferences between voters and their vote choice and, subsequently, decrease parliamentary polarization. Recognizing that voters’ political preferences are more complex than a dichotomous party-vote allows, we propose the ‘assembly ballot’, which allows voters to choose their ‘ideal parliament’ by distributing 150 parliamentary seats across all participating parties. To assess the consequences of the assembly ballot for ideological congruence and parliamentary composition, we conducted a survey experiment with over 16,000 respondents around the 2017 Dutch parliamentary elections in which respondents cast a vote in a mock-election using the assembly ballot or a closed-list PR ballot. Results show that ideological congruence is, on average, significantly higher for voters voting with the assembly ballot for both the left–right dimension and the cultural dimension, while also producing a more centripetal, less polarized parliament.

A lively debate among students of parliamentary democracy concerns how coalition governments build their policy proposals. Some scholars maintain that government declarations mirror the position of the median party in parliament; others argue that these proposals better agree with the weighted mean of the coalition parties’ electoral promises. This article sheds light on this puzzle by investigating the role played by several political actors in shaping government declarations on two dimensions: the ideological left–right scale and a genuinely policy-based welfare scale. The results reveal that the agenda setters on the two dimensions do not coincide. On the left–right scale, the prime minister’s party plays a leading role. On the welfare scale, government declarations are affected by the party of the median legislator in parliament and by the parties of the labour and social affairs ministers. Furthermore, government declarations on the welfare dimension tend to drift rightwards with adverse economic conditions.