Programmatic party-voter linkages have become severely constrained over the past decades for at least two reasons: on the one hand, parties face increasingly divided and volatile electorates. On the other hand, economic globalization has restricted governments’ macro-economic room for manoeuvre. According to cartel party theory, economic globalization causes parties to downsize expectations and externalise policy commitments, leading to a convergence of party. The realignment literature, by contrast, argues that parties are still responsive to their voters, but adapt to socio-structural changes as well as preference shifts in the electorate.

What are the conditions for and mechanisms of representation in times of severe policy constraints, when parties’ policy choices are confronted with voter dealignment and volatile electorates on the one hand and constraints imposed by economic globalization on the other? The papers of this panel address this question from different perspectives. Giger, Häusermann and Traber test whether parties try to deal with increasing austerity constraints by emphasizing or de-emphasizing particular issues. Schumacher and Giger address the question whether strong party leadership affects the capacity of parties to represent their voters. Rohrschneider and Whitefield examine the positions of parties towards the representative capacity of the democratic system itself and Bornschier complements the panel by asking what Europeanists can learn from the dynamics of voter representation in Latin American democracies, which have obviously been exposed to severe constraints for representation for a much longer time than Western European ones.