Ian Budge is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Essex. He has made major contributions both to cumulative research on democracy and to organizational developments in the discipline. His earliest research on Glasgow and Belfast focused on causes of democratic breakdown. After a period of studying elections, voting behavior, and party competition, he turned to public policy and how it might become responsive to popular preferences - a central democratic dilemma. His research covers both direct and representative democracy. He founded the Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis in 1968. He has been President of the European Consortium in Political Research between 1979 - 83. Among his recent publications, (with Klingemann et al.), Mapping Policy Preferences: Estimates for Parties, Electorates and Governments 1945 - 1998 (2001), Elections, Parties, Democracy: Conferring the Median Mandate (with Michael D. McDonald) (2005); The New British Politics (Ian Budge, David McKay, Kenneth Newton and John Bartle) (2007). Sir Ivor Crewe is the Master of University College, Oxford. He is a former vice-chancellor of the University of Essex and president of Universities UK. His work covers British politics, especially elections, parties, and public opinion. He directed the British Election Study from 1973 to 1981 and has edited the British Journal of Political Science. Dennis J. Farlie is a mathematical statistician who has served a director of the ESRC Social Science Data Archive at the University of Essex and chairman of its Department of Mathematics. He has collaborated with Ian Budge on several applications of Bayesian statistics to political science data, covering voting, election predictions, and political careers.