Comparative Study of Electoral Systems data.

Studies of the public opinion-policy link argue that policy changes are represen-tative when they reflect aggregate-level changes in public opinion. The opinions of most citizens, however, do not change very much over time. As result, govern-ment policy may reflect the changing interests of only a small subset of attentive, informed, and articulate voters. Who are these voters? Where do the poorest citizens of contemporary democracies fit in? Under what conditions are elected officials likely to be more or less responsive to the preferences of poor voters? What are the distributional consequences of partisan and electoral incentives to be more or less responsive to the poor? I address these questions in a larger, broadly comparative study of the political representation of the poor. Here, I focus on the question, “How well are the interests of the poor represented in contemporary democratic governments? ” and develop a simple model of representation that will serve as a way to evaluate patterns of representation. The parameters of this model are estimated usin