Does electoral competition matter for responsiveness of governments to citizens’ preferences? Although a substantive part of contemporary democratic theory underlines that competition is good for democracy, it is very debated whether competition has an impact on responsiveness on the empirical ground. Empirical analyses linking dynamic representation and political institutions are still rare and only a few studies introduce the institutional component to dynamic models. Similarly, if the studies on dyadic and collective representation are included, it is shown that competition is mostly conceived as competitiveness. Yet electoral competitiveness is not the unique element of electoral competition that might affect responsiveness. This paper builds on the theoretical framework on electoral competition developed by Bartolini (1999, 2000). This framework represents the state of the art in the study of the concept of competition in politics and breaks it up into four components: (1) electoral contestability, (2) electoral availability, (3) decidability of the offer, and (4) incumbent vulnerability.
Nevertheless, it still remains a theoretical framework hence the aim of the paper is twofold. On the one hand, the paper provides an empirical application of this framework; on the other hand, its interest is in testing whether these components have an impact on government responsiveness, where responsiveness is defined as the correspondence between citizens’ preferences and government activity.
