ABSTRACT
According to Robert Dahl, a leading democratic theorist, a key characteristic of democracy is the continued responsiveness of the government to the preferences of the people. Responsiveness is one of the key indicators of the quality of democracy, and refers to a series of links which are needed to ensure the relationship between citizens and their government. Two pieces of information are required to ascertain the policy distance between citizens and their government: the preferences of individual citizens, and the position of their government. Studies have found that even in the absence of comprehensive knowledge of what the left-right scale entails, most people can distinguish differences between parties along a variety of dimensions, which can in turn be summarized in terms of left and right. Determining party position is just the first step to arriving at a measure of policy proximity between citizens and their government, the next step is to do the same for the entire cabinet.
