Political Science Association

Parties and Representation in the American Legislatures This paper seeks to join two widely held propositions about democratic politics. The first is that political representation is a central feature of democratic government. The purpose of elections and lawmaking by those elected is to insure that public policy is broadly responsive to the preferences of the citizenry. The second proposition is that political parties are fundamental to the operation of representative government in complex societies. We seek to bring these two generalizations together to provide empirical tests of the broad notion that strong, competitive political parties enhance the quality of representative democracy. While the assertion that parties are good for representation probably would not draw many immediate challenges, that idea remains largely an article of faith rather than a demonstrated empirical proposition. We know a good deal about the relationship between constituency preferences and the policy voting of legislators, and we know a good deal about political parities, but the research in these areas has not shown if and how parties enhance the quality of representative government—at least not within the context of contemporary US political institutions. This paper draws on a new data set and adopts a comparative approach