Correction to (When) do electoral mandates set the agenda? Government capacity and mandate responsiveness in Germany

Abstract

Guinaudeau, B., & Guinaudeau, I. (2023). (When) do electoral mandates set the agenda? Government capacity and mandate responsiveness in Germany. European Journal of Political Research, 62(4), 1212–1234. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12557

Page 1226, the following comment on Model 5 is incorrect: ‘The interaction term is not significant, suggesting that Bundesrat control does not significantly affect mandate responsiveness’. The interaction term is in fact significant and negative. This should have read: ‘Surprisingly, the negative and significant interaction effect suggests that having a majority in the Bundesrat even goes hand in hand with lower levels of mandate responsiveness’.

Still on page 1226, the number of the model in the following sentence is wrong: ‘The constitutive term for platform priorities in Model 7 shows that their relationship with legislative subjects is significant for areas immune to any Europeanization…’ Europeanization is analysed in Model 8 and not in Model 7. Therefore, the correction is: ‘The constitutive term for platform priorities in Model 8 shows that their relationship with legislative subjects is significant for areas immune to any Europeanization…’

Page 1228, a whole paragraph went lost in the finalization process. This paragraph was initially located between the second paragraph (‘Our findings also confirm the conditioning impact of budget conditions. The constitutive term for platform priorities shows that for a positive budget balance their impact on legislation is significant. The marginal effects displayed in Figure 4 show this is no longer the case when the account balance gets negative, however, as in the period from the early 1990s to the early 2000s’.) and the third one (‘This first empirical account of how mandate responsiveness is constrained by vertical and operational capacity generally supports the concerns that the relationship between electoral and legislative priorities relies on a certain level of national sovereignty and favourable budget conditions. When these conditions are not met, electoral and legislative priorities appear to be statistically disconnected from each other’.). The lost paragraph needs to be reinserted: ‘‘Finally, we examine how public pressure circumscribes the government's ability to focus lawmaking on mandate priorities. The marginal effects presented in Figure 5, based on Model 10, confirm the intuition that while popular governments enjoy comfortable latitude, unpopular governments face more difficulties in legislating on mandate priorities. We knew from past studies that popularity crises prompt them to tackle problems that are most salient among voters (e.g. Bernardi, 2020) and that this diverts executives away from their “owned” issues (Green & Jennings, 2019). These new findings reveal that this has important implications for mandate responsiveness as well: government have reasons to respond to salient public priorities, no matter if those were prominent in their campaign or not. This suggests that mandate representation and other forms of representation related to accountability and democratic responsiveness to public demands combine themselves. Governments deliver on mandate priorities within the margins defined by upcoming salient problems and their popularity’.

Finally, the current Figure 3 is not the right one (currently it is the same as Figure 4). The correct Figure 3 can be found below. The title and note to the figure can remain as they are.