INTRODUCTION

In Chapter 3, I investigated the way citizens vote in parliamentary democracies. Parliaments consisting of multiple parties, split control over the plan of the day, and coalition governments are commonly characterized by fractionalized power. Another obvious sign of power sharing is a variety of viewpoints represented by parties that participate in policy formation. But this is only one form in which policy is produced by multiple inputs. An explicit separation of power between an executive and a legislature is yet another form that voters often encounter. How voters vote when power is diffused across institutions, and particularly between the executive and the legislature, is the focus of this chapter.

Before delving into the details of the analysis, let me review the implications of the compensatory model for presidential systems, and preview my empirical results. The implications of the argument for presidential democracies are straightforward. While in parliamentary democracies it is parties in parliament that negotiate and compromise, in presidential democracies the compromise is cross-institutional, between the executive and the legislature. If voters are concerned with policy, they may not necessarily support individual politicians whose views are similar to their own, but rather those who, given the expected compromise, will produce policy as close as possible to their own views.