Electoral System Design in New Democracies

2017 ◽  
pp. 84-112
Author(s):  
John M. Carey
Keyword(s):  
Electoral System ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Electoral Rules ◽  
National Data ◽  
Electoral Outcomes ◽  
Choice Sets ◽  
Moderate Scale ◽  
Proportional Elections ◽  
High Uncertainty ◽  
Cross National

Elections in the wake of dramatic transitions from authoritarian regimes to democracy may confront voters with choices that are unattractive or bewildering, or both. This chapter examines the conditions that produce tractable sets of party options for voters, presents cross-national data on the choice sets and competitiveness in elections after dramatic transitions, and examines how the electoral formula used in proportional elections can affect electoral outcomes. The chapter argues that, in transitional contexts characterized by high uncertainty, electoral rules that reward economies of moderate scale, such as the Hare quota formula, can encourage the development of attractive choice sets. As democracies and party systems develop, however, the case for electoral rules that confer representational bonuses on winning parties gains traction.

scholarly journals Votes for Women: Electoral Systems and Support for Female Candidates

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (01) ◽  
pp. 107-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sona N. Golder ◽  
Laura B. Stephenson ◽  
Karine Van der Straeten ◽  
André Blais ◽  
Damien Bol ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Electoral Systems ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Proportional Representation ◽  
Electoral Rules ◽  
National Data ◽  
Female Candidates ◽  
Voter Preferences ◽  
Individual Vote ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Cross National

It is a well-established finding that proportional representation (PR) electoral systems are associated with greater legislative representation for women than single member systems. However, the degree to which different types of PR rules affect voting for female candidates has not been fully explored. The existing literature is also hampered by a reliance on cross-national data in which individual vote preferences and electoral system features are endogenous. In this study, we draw upon an experiment conducted during the 2014 European Parliament (EP) elections to isolate the effects of different PR electoral systems. Participants in the experiment were given the opportunity to vote for real EP candidates in three different electoral systems: closed list, open list, and open list with panachage and cumulation. Because voter preferences can be held constant across the three different votes, we can evaluate the extent to which female candidates were more or less advantaged by the electoral system itself. We find that voters, regardless of their gender, support female candidates, and that this support is stronger under open electoral rules.

Electoral Systems in Context

2017 ◽  
pp. 870-900
Author(s):  
Steven L. Taylor ◽  
Matthew S. Shugart
Keyword(s):  
Rare Case ◽  
Natural Experiment ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Electoral Rules ◽  
District Magnitude ◽  
Major Shift ◽  
Open Versus ◽  
Democratic Elections

Colombia represents a rare case of a political context with a number of electoral system changes over a period of years. It serves as a natural experiment that demonstrates that party systems do react to changes in institutional parameters. There have been uninterrupted democratic elections that allow for long-term comparative study of the effects of electoral reform. From 1974 to 2014, several different basic electoral rules can be observed including single nontransferable vote (SNTV), and the D’Hondt form of party-list proportional representation. Additionally, other factors have changed including a major shift in district magnitude for the election of the Senate, a move from plurality to a two-round system for electing the president, and other areas of change including ballot format and open versus closed lists. Few cases demonstrate as many different areas of electoral study as does Colombia.

Electoral Systems in Context

2017 ◽  
pp. 942-964
Author(s):  
Karen E. Ferree
Keyword(s):  
Party System ◽  
Contextual Factors ◽  
National Level ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
African National Congress ◽  
Electoral Institutions ◽  
Electoral Rules ◽  
National Assembly ◽  
Institutional Expectations

South Africa’s post-apartheid election outcomes demonstrate how contextual factors interact with electoral rules to shape party systems. South Africa’s national electoral system represents one of the most permissive in the world, combining parliamentary rules with an extreme form of proportional representation. These rules were selected to encourage broad representation of parties in the National Assembly. However, South Africa’s party system consistently defies expectations, with a low effective number of seat-winning parties at the national level and dominance by a single party, the African National Congress (ANC). Provincial and municipal outcomes also confound simple institutional expectations. In addition to describing electoral rules and party systems at all three levels of South Africa’s political system, this chapter argues that contextual factors like the salience of racial divisions and the ability of the ruling party to shape institutions and resource flows critically interact with electoral institutions to shape party system outcomes.

Party systems, electoral systems, and legislative fragmentation

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 487-497 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grigorii V Golosov
Keyword(s):  
Electoral System ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Electoral Rules ◽  
Incentive Structures ◽  
Strong Negative Association ◽  
Degree Of Certainty ◽  
Party Support ◽  
Sovereign Territory ◽  
High Degree ◽  
The Impact

Using electoral data from a nearly comprehensive set of the world’s electoral democracies (1992–2014), including 131 independent countries and one non-sovereign territory, this article develops an explanatory model of legislative fragmentation that incorporates electoral fragmentation, the territorial patterns of party support, district magnitude, specific electoral system effects, and the balance of personal and party vote components within the incentive structures generated by electoral rules. The analysis proves that there is a strong negative association between the territorial homogeneity of the vote and legislative fragmentation, and shows that those varieties of electoral rules that increase the salience of personal component in party-centred elections tend to enhance legislative fragmentation. Due to its statistical properties, the model allows for establishing the impact of each of the factors, as well as their relative weights, with a high degree of certainty.

Why do Democracies Experience Antisystem Movements: Statistical Analysis from Interwar Europe (1919-1939)

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (03) ◽  
pp. 20402-20415
Author(s):  
Idlir Lika
Keyword(s):  
Logistic Regression ◽  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Regression Models ◽  
Causal Effect ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
National Data ◽  
Logistic Regression Models ◽  
Party Institutionalization ◽  
Interwar Europe ◽  
Cross National

Why do some democracies experience antisystem movements whereas others do not? Enlisting novel cross-national data from Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project and empirically focusing on interwar Europe, this article statistically tests widely-accepted theoretical claims in the literature on political authoritarianism. Logistic regression models applied on 22 interwar European democracies reveal that economic crises are a major cause behind antisystem movement emergence whereas the evidence for attributing causal effect to party institutionalization is not strong enough. Furthermore, the results show that in polarized party systems, the support of center-left/right parties is a crucial factor that leads to antisystem movement emergence in democratic polities.   

The Never-ending Story of Law and Electoral System in Lesotho

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hoolo Nyane
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Legal Discourse ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Constitutional Democracy ◽  
Electoral Outcomes ◽  
Electoral Laws ◽  
Run Up ◽  
Mixed Electoral System ◽  
2012 Election

While electoral discontent has been the enduring feature of constitutional democracy in Lesotho since independence, disagreement over electoral system is a fairly recent phenomenon. When the country attained independence in 1966 from Britain, electoral system was not necessarily one of the topical issues of pre-independence constitutional negotiations. The major issues were the powers of the monarch, the office of prime minister, the command of the army and many more.  It was taken for granted that the country would use the British-based plurality electoral system.  This is the system which the country used until early 2000s when the electoral laws were reformed to anchor a new mixed electoral system.  When the new electoral laws were ultimately passed in 2001, the country transitioned from a plurality electoral system to a two-ballot mixed member proportional system. By this time, electoral system had acquired prominence in politico-legal discourse in Lesotho.  In the run-up to 2007 elections, bigger political parties orchestrated the manipulation of electoral laws which culminated in clearly distorted electoral outcomes. The manipulations motivated further reforms in the run-up to 2012 election which resulted in the single-ballot mixed member proportional system. The purpose of this paper is to critically evaluate how electoral laws have anchored electoral system reforms throughout the various historical epochs in Lesotho since independence. The paper contends that while the country has been courageous, unlike most of its peers, to introduce far-reaching electoral system changes, the reform of electoral laws has not been so helpful in attaining the higher objectives of political inclusivity, constitutionalism and stability in Lesotho.

Federal and Subnational Elections in Russia: Coherence and Divergence in Electoral Outcomes

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-353
Author(s):  
Rostislav Turovsky ◽  
Marina Sukhova
Keyword(s):  
Party System ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Strong Connection ◽  
Regional Parties ◽  
Electoral Outcomes ◽  
Electoral Authoritarianism ◽  
Subnational Elections ◽  
Effective Number Of Parties ◽  
Number Of Parties ◽  
Regional Elections

Abstract This article examines the differences between Russian voting at federal elections and regional legislature elections, both combined and conducted independently. The authors analyse these differences, their character and their dynamics as an important characteristic of the nationalisation of the party system. They also test hypotheses about a higher level of oppositional voting and competitiveness in subnational elections, in accordance with the theory of second-order elections, as well as the strategic nature of voting at federal elections, by contrast with expressive voting during subnational campaigns. The empirical study is based on calculating the differences in votes for leading Russian parties at subnational elections and at federal elections (simultaneous, preceding and following) from 2003, when mandatory voting on party lists was widespread among the regions, to 2019. The level of competitiveness is measured in a similar way, by calculating the effective number of parties. The study indicates a low level of autonomy of regional party systems, in many ways caused by the fact that the law made it impossible to create regional parties, and then also by the 2005 ban on creation of regional blocs. The strong connection between federal and regional elections in Russia clearly underlines the fluid and asynchronic nature of its electoral dynamics, where subnational elections typically predetermine the results of the following federal campaigns. At the same time, the formal success of the nationalisation of the party system, achieved by increasing the homogeneity of voting at the 2016 and 2018 federal elections, is not reflected by the opposing process of desynchronisation between federal and regional elections after Putin’s third-term election. There is also a clear rise in the scale of the differences between the two. At the same time, the study demonstrates the potential presence in Russia of features common to subnational elections in many countries: their greater support for the opposition and presence of affective voting. However, there is a clear exception to this trend during the period of maximum mobilisation of the loyal electorate at the subnational elections immediately following the accession of Crimea in 2014–2015, and such tendencies are generally restrained by the conditions of electoral authoritarianism.

scholarly journals Assessing Short-Term Fertility Intentions and Their Realisation Using the Generations and Gender Survey: Pitfalls and Challenges

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zuzanna Brzozowska ◽  
Eva Beaujouan
Keyword(s):  
Fertility Intentions ◽  
Fertility Intention ◽  
National Data ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Degree Of Certainty ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Questionnaire Adaptation ◽  
Cross National

AbstractThe use of fertility intention questions to study individual childbearing behaviour has developed rapidly in recent decades. In Europe, the Generations and Gender Surveys are the main sources of cross-national data on fertility intentions and their realisation. This study investigates how an inconsistent implementation of a question about wanting a child now affects the cross-country comparability of intentions to have a child within the next three years and their realisation. We conduct our analysis separately for women and men at prime and late reproductive ages in Austria, France, Italy and Poland. The results show that the overall share of respondents intending to have a child at some point in their life is similar in all four analysed countries. However, once the time horizon and the degree of certainty of fertility intentions are included, substantial cross-country differences appear, particularly in terms of proceptive behaviour and, consequently, the realisation of fertility intentions. We conclude that the inconsistent questionnaire adaptation makes it very difficult to assess the role of country context in the realisation of childbearing intentions.

scholarly journals Using Intrade.com to Teach Campaign Strategies in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (01) ◽  
pp. 139-144
Author(s):  
Paul R. Abramson
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Election ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
Electoral Rules ◽  
Campaign Strategies ◽  
Electoral Outcomes ◽  
Campaigns And Elections ◽  
Political Outcomes ◽  
Bid Prices ◽  
The Way

AbstractDuring the six weeks before the 2008 elections, I conducted a contest for the 72 students enrolled in my upper-division course Campaigns and Elections. Using contract prices posted by Intrade.com, an electronic gaming market based in Dublin, I asked students to choose among 10 political outcomes. The “contracts” earned by each choice were determined by the Intrade “bid” prices as of September 24, 2008, the day the contest began. The contest helped teach students about campaign strategies, the way electoral rules affect electoral outcomes, provided a reference point to discuss the campaign, and was designed to stimulate interest in the election.

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