Forthcoming in Electoral Studies

Public policy is the central focus of political science. It is supposed under democracy to be necessarily linked to public preferences through elections. Election outcomes however are shaped not only by the votes cast but also by the party-policy options on offer and the rules by which votes are aggregated into seats. An interesting question is whether rules exert their influence through the party system they help shape or whether public policy is directly affected by the type of electoral system in force. These questions are examined here over the whole of the post-war period with evidence on policy preferences at electoral and governmental levels in 21countries. We discover that popular preferences are transmitted more clearly into government policy intentions under PR than under other rules. However, the introduction of an over time measure reveals that the difference is not as great as it appears with purely cross-sectional measures. Interesting variations in representational efficiency also emerge between majority, plurality, and run-off rules