This paper investigates the relationship between electoral competition and policy responsiveness and tests it in four European advanced democracies (Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the UK, 1995-2009). Its purpose is twofold. On one side, it provides an empirical application of the theoretical framework on electoral competition developed by Bartolini (1999, 2000). According to this framework, competition is broken up into four components: (1) electoral contestability, (2) electoral availability, (3) decidability of the offer, and (4) vulnerability of the elite. On the other side, the paper aims to understand whether the components of competition affect policy responsiveness, which is defined as the correspondence between citizens’ preferences (using the ‘most important problem’ question) and government expenditure in four policy area (defence, environment, health, and pensions). The focus of the paper is to determine which configuration of electoral competition is more likely to lead to higher levels of policy responsiveness.
