How does representative democracy work in the modern age? Examining 21 post-war democracies, this strikingly innovative approach by two world-class scholars demonstrates how the voter in the middle--the median elector--empowers the centre party in parliament to translate political preferences into public policy.

This book is probably the most important source of evidence published up to now on the consolidation of democracy in Eastern Europe. It provides estimates of party positions, voter preferences and government policy from election programmes collected systematically for 51 countries from 1990 onwards. Time-series are presented in the text. This also reports party life histories (essential to over time analyses) and provides updated and newly validated vote statistics. All this information and much more is available on the devoted website described in the book. The final chapter gives...

Two revolutions--health system change and the building of the national information infrastructure--are transforming American health care and dramatically affecting the health of Americans. The specific shape and pace of this transformation are impossible to predict today, but our observations of early initiatives give us some modest confidence that present day concepts of what determines health and disease and our methods of intervening will be dramatically different in the no too distant future.