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AbstractThis article integrates ideology into a game‐theoretical model of centre‐periphery bargains. Ideological differences between national and sub‐national elites constitute a major obstacle for the accommodation of autonomy claims. While reforms bringing about decentralization are often analysed systematically as well as through case studies, cases where, despite claims to autonomy, decentralization does not occur have been largely neglected by scholars of territorial politics. Turkey is such a 'negative case'. We argue that ideological distance prevents national parties from accommodating peripheral authority claims. We test our expectation with a mixed‐methods approach that combines quantitative analysis of party positions with in‐depth qualitative analysis of party documents showing how the different ideological positions of national and Kurdish parties affect decentralization demand and national response in Turkey between 1987 and 2015. Our findings support the theoretical expectations, but also point to additional inferences. Whereas asymmetric authority demands have been widely ignored, symmetric local autonomy has become an important issue in territorial politics.

Lijphart's spectrum of democracies – recently expanded by Jack Nagel to a sub-majoritarian sphere of pluralitarian systems which use disproportional electoral systems in order to manufacture majority governments from minorities in the electorate – is based on only one dimension: inclusion of preferences. Political scientists in the Lijphartian tradition wrongly assume that inclusion of preferences, which is an input characteristic, automatically leads to responsiveness, which refers to actual policy decisions and hence is an output characteristic. We therefore add 'responsibility' as a second input characteristic and employ it alongside the inclusiveness of institutional regimes. We argue that in representative democracies there exists a trade-off between inclusiveness and responsibility. This trade-off helps us to measure the democratic quality of institutional regimes. The now expanded spectrum of democracies based on these two dimensions shows that majoritarian democracy proper – in which governments represent a majority of individual preferences but not more than necessary – is the best possible combination of the two democratic values.