scholarly journals Using geoinformation tools for redistricting: Slovenian experiences

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 149-156
Author(s):  
Boštjan Rogelj ◽  
Marko Krevs
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Distribution ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
District Magnitude ◽  
Electoral Support ◽  
Election Results ◽  
New System

Electoral districts are an important component of the electoral system, as they have a significant impact on election results. Due to the uneven spatial distribution of electoral support political parties receive, district magnitude and the geography of electoral districts can have a decisive influence on the electoral viability of individual parties and candidates. Districting and redistricting are not a simple bureaucratic process but a politically very sensitive process with outcomes that can have far-reaching political consequences. Geoinformation tools can have a very important role in electoral district planning. In this article we aim to present the key advantages and disadvantages of their use. The presented results are derived from practical experience gained over the course of developing a new system of electoral districts in Slovenia.

Ghana's political parties: how ethno/regional variations sustain the national two-party system

2006 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 623-647 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minion K. C. Morrison ◽  
Jae Woo Hong
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Party System ◽  
National Level ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Party Organisation ◽  
Electoral Support ◽  
Fourth Republic ◽  
Complex Varieties ◽  
Election Results

This paper analyses Ghanaian electoral geography and its accompanying political party variations over the last decade. After re-democratisation in the early 1990s, the Fourth Republic of Ghana has successfully completed multiple elections and party alternation. Due to its single-member-district-plurality electoral system, the country has functioned virtually as a two-party system, privileging its two major parties – the NDC and the NPP. However, close examination of election results in the last parliamentary and presidential elections reveals that notwithstanding the two-party tendency, there is a dynamic and multilayered aspect of electoral participation in Ghanaian politics. Ethnic-based regional cleavages show much more complex varieties of electoral support for the two major parties, especially in light of fragmentation and concentration. Electoral support in the ten regions varies from strong one-party-like to almost three-party systems. Yet this lower, regional level tendency is not invariable. Regional party strengths have shifted from election to election, and it was just such shifts that made the party alternation possible in 2000. Employing traditional and newly designed indicators, this paper illustrates the patterns of electoral cleavage and regional party organisation, and how these ultimately sustain the party system at the national level in Ghana.

2018 Fiji Election Results: Patterns of Voting by Provinces, Rural-Urban Localities, and by Candidates

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Haruo Nakagawa
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Interesting Case ◽  
The Political ◽  
Quantitative Analyses ◽  
Election Results

Akin to the previous, 2014 event, with no data on voter ethnicity, no exit polls, and few post-election analyses, the 2018 Fiji election results remain something of a mystery despite the fact that there had been a significant swing in voting in favour of Opposition political parties. There have been several studies about the election results, but most of them have been done without much quantitative analyses. This study examines voting patterns of Fiji’s 2018 election by provinces, and rural-urban localities, as well as by candidates, and also compares the 2018 and 2014 elections by spending a substantial time classifying officially released data by polling stations and individual candidates. Some of the data are then further aggregated according to the political parties to which those candidates belonged. The current electoral system in Fiji is a version of a proportional system, but its use is rare and this study will provide an interesting case study of the Open List Proportional System. At the end of the analyses, this study considers possible reasons for the swing in favour of the Opposition.

Dimensions of Variation in Electoral Systems

2017 ◽  
pp. 22-40
Author(s):  
Michael Gallagher ◽  
Paul Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Electoral Systems ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Policy Choices ◽  
District Magnitude ◽  
Essential Components ◽  
Seat Allocation ◽  
Dimensions Of Variation

Electoral systems matter. They are a crucial link in the chain connecting the preferences of citizens to the policy choices made by governments. They are chosen by political actors and, once in existence, have political consequences for those actors. This chapter argues that electoral system choice is a highly consequential matter for democratic states and offers a comparative overview of the principal means by which electoral systems vary. What are the essential components of real-world electoral systems? The chapter emphasizes the importance of district magnitude, ballot structure (with three main types: categorical, dividual, and ordinal), “levels” of seat allocation, methods of selecting candidates within parties, and devices for limiting proportionality.

The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws, 1945–85

1990 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 481-496 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arend Lijphart
Keyword(s):  
Strategic Behavior ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Electoral Outcomes ◽  
District Magnitude ◽  
Electoral Laws ◽  
System Variables ◽  
Number Of Parties ◽  
Western Democracies

A systematic analysis of the relationships between the main electoral system variables (electoral formula, district magnitude, and ballot structure) and electoral outcomes (the degrees of disproportionality and multipartism) in the 20 Western democracies from 1945 to 1985—representing 32 distinct electoral systems (an electoral system being defined as a set of elections held under basically the same rules)—shows that the effects of both formula and magnitude on proportionality are very strong, much stronger than Douglas W. Rae and subsequent researchers have suggested; that on the other hand, their effects on the number of parties participating in elections is surprisingly weak; and that ballot structure affects the degree of multipartism only in single-member district systems. These findings suggest that strategic behavior by politicians and voters plays a less important role in reducing multipartism than is usually assumed.

Mobilization Against the Left? Partisan Consequences of Voter Turnout in the Post-Communist Context

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michal Nový
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Voter Turnout ◽  
Party Identification ◽  
Parliamentary Election ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Electoral Support ◽  
Class Voting ◽  
Election Results ◽  
Explanatory Mechanism

AbstractDoes higher turnout support left-wing parties, as many previous studies assume? Theoretical discussions thus far have been relatively inconclusive. This study proposes three different explanatory mechanisms for examining an aggregate-level relationship between turnout and electoral support for political parties in the post-communist milieu. The conventional hypothesis, based on the assumptions of a successful re-stratification of society and the relevance of class voting, states that higher turnout benefits the left. The second hypothesis is derived from the Michigan model of party identification. In this case, political parties with less loyal electorates would be expected to profit from higher rates of electoral participation. However, this article makes the case for a third possible explanation, termed simply “mobilization against the left,” which reverses the conventional hypothesis. The idea is that the more people come to the polls, the stronger the post-communist right-wing parties will be. This analysis includes two Czech regions that can be said to be farthest away from each other in terms of their socioeconomic and political characteristics. Having analyzed the 2010 Czech parliamentary election results across 1444 electoral districts in two regions, Central Bohemia and Moravia-Silesia, we conclude that there is certain empirical evidence that supports the proposed explanatory mechanism regarding the relationship between voter turnout and share of votes for political parties.

Electoral Reform or Not: Party Interests Defeated Principled Arguments in the Late Nineteenth Century and Have Characterised the UK’s Electoral System Since

2020 ◽  
pp. 147892991989324
Author(s):  
Ron Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Electoral Reform ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Class A ◽  
Election Results

Conti’s Parliament the Mirror of the Nation is an excellent, thorough exploration and explication of nineteenth-century debates over electoral reform as members of Britain’s intellectual elite wrestled with the issue of how to create a system that would ensure that all opinions were advanced in the country’s Parliament without an expansion of the franchise, meaning that the House of Commons was overwhelmed by the working class. A superb contribution to intellectual history, however, it makes little contact with the ‘real world’ of politics, where the short-term interests of the dominant political parties led to pragmatic rather than idealistic resolution to that issue. That resolution, negotiated by leading politicians from the two main parties, led to an electoral reform in 1885 based on single-member, territorially based constituencies that, with modifications only, remains in place today, generating general election results that are both disproportional and biased as a consequence of the system’s geographical construction

Candidates in Parliamentary Elections: Analysis of the Preferential Voting in the Elections to the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic in 2006

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Petr Voda ◽  
Michal Pink
Keyword(s):  
Czech Republic ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Total Count ◽  
The Czech Republic ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
Election Results ◽  
Chamber Of Deputies

The paper deals with the issue of the "candidate effect" within the proportional electoral system. The basic database consists of the total count and the share of preferential votes won by the candidates listed as first on party ballots in the Czech national parliamentary elections in June 2006. These election results, which are analyzed in the following text, are limited only to the ballots of those political parties that won seats in the Chamber of Deputies (that is, CSSD, KDU-CSL, KSCM, ODS, SZ). Individual outputs are based on a comparison of the election results for particular candidates in their electoral districts, in relation to their positions on the party ballots.

scholarly journals Do TJ policies cause backlash? Evidence from street name changes in Spain

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 205316802110585
Author(s):  
Francisco Villamil ◽  
Laia Balcells
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Sensitive Topics ◽  
Electoral Support

Memories of old conflicts often shape domestic politics long after these conflicts end. Contemporary debates about past civil wars and/or repressive regimes in different parts of the world suggest that these are sensitive topics that might increase political polarization, particularly when transitional justice policies are implemented and political parties mobilize discontentment with such policies. One such policy recently debated in Spain is removing public symbols linked to a past civil war and subsequent authoritarian regime (i.e., Francoism). However, the empirical evidence on its impact is still limited. This article attempts to fill this gap by examining the political consequences of street renaming. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we show that the removal of Francoist street names has contributed to an increase of electoral support for a new far-right party, Vox, mainly at the expense of a traditional right-wing conservative party, PP. Our results suggest that revisiting the past can cause a backlash among those ideologically aligned with the perpetrator, and that some political parties can capitalize on this.

Politics and Elections in Buenos Aires, 1890–1898: The Performance of the Radical Party

1993 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 465-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Alonso
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Participation ◽  
Electoral Support ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Three main political parties regularly contested elections in Argentina in the late nineteenth century: the Partido Autonomista Nacional (PAN), the Unión Cívica Nacional (UCN), and the Unión Cívica Radical (UCR). However, little is known about the nature of party competition, the contesting parties' electoral performances or the characteristics of their electoral support. Discussion of the electoral politics prior to 1912, when the vote became secret and compulsory for all Argentine males over 18 years of age, has been dominated by notions of corruption, repression and lack of opportunity for popular participation. While in other countries such assessments have been revised in recent years after unreformed elections were analysed in more detail, accounts of electoral repression are still dominant in discussions of the pre-1912 Argintine electoral system.

District magnitude and electoral mobilization: how uneven electoral systems shift the focus of campaign efforts by political parties

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Michio Umeda
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Party System ◽  
Electoral Systems ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Proportional Representation ◽  
Survey Period ◽  
District Magnitude ◽  
Party Strategies ◽  
Electoral Mobilization ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This paper shows how an uneven electoral system in Japan shapes political parties' mobilization strategies by utilizing a majoritarian electoral system with heterogeneous district magnitudes, which in turn contributes to the gap in turnout across districts. Scholars have long debated the relationship between electoral systems and turnout; it is known that countries with proportional representation electoral systems – those with larger district magnitude – tend to have higher turnout rates than countries with majoritarian electoral systems, especially single-member district (SMD) systems. The current discussion on turnout and district magnitude of an electoral system assumes a monotonic relationship between these factors: the larger the district magnitude of the electoral system, the more (or less) participatory the electorate, due to competitiveness and mobilization efforts by political parties and other relevant groups. In contrast, this paper shows a mixed relationship between district magnitude of the electoral system and party mobilization and subsequent turnout, investigating a majoritarian electoral system with uneven district magnitude in the Japanese Upper House. During the survey period, the party system in Japan consisted of two major parties and a few smaller parties; consequently, the two major parties focused their efforts on SMDs in order to maximize their seat share, while smaller parties focused their resource on districts electing more than two members (where they have some chance to elect their party's candidates). In combination, these party strategies have resulted in the lowest mobilization and turnout rates in districts with two members.

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