Ballot spoilage as a response to limitations on choice and influence

Electoral systems vary in terms of the choice and influence they offer voters. Beyond selecting between parties, preferential systems allow for choices within parties. More proportional systems make it likely that influence over who determines the assembly’s majority will be distributed across relatively more voters. In response to systems that limit choice and influence, we hypothesize that voters will cast more blank, null, or spoiled ballots on purpose. We use a regression discontinuity opportunity in French municipal elections to test this hypothesis. An exogenously chosen and arbitrary cutpoint is used to determine the electoral rules municipalities use to select their assemblies. We find support for our reasoning—systems that do not allow intraparty preference votes and that lead to disproportional outcomes provoke vote spoilage. Rates of vote spoilage are frequently sufficient to change control over the assembly if those votes had instead been cast validly for the second-place party.

Electoral Systems, Selection, and Re-election:Evidence from Italian Municipalities

Using micro-level data on local Italian elections and exploiting a discontinuity at a population cutoff, I study the effect of electoral systems on politician selection and re-election. Evidence shows that the mayor’s probability of re-election is 25 percentage points higher in majoritarian systems than in proportional systems. Ruling coalitions elected under the majoritarian system enjoy a stable and long-lasting majority, attract more central transfers, and invest more in public libraries. While mayors elected under the two different electoral systems do not differ in any observable characteristics, they do tend to embark on a different political careers once they lose their municipal office. Surprisingly, mayors elected under the proportional system have a higher probability of being elected to regional offices after their mandate. (JEL D72, H70, P16)

1. Electoral Systems

This chapter examines the variety of electoral systems in Europe. Electoral systems lie at the heart of democratic politics, influencing who citizens’ representatives are and having profound effects upon politics at large. The authors start by presenting the variety of electoral systems used across Europe, focusing on three key dimensions: electoral formulas, district magnitudes, and ballot structures. Then they discuss some of the main developments in electoral systems in Europe since 1945, highlighting shifts towards limited proportional systems and more ‘personalized’ systems. Finally, they probe deeper into the consequences of electoral systems, looking at effects on the nature of competition both between and within political parties.

Party preference representation

Political parties are key actors in electoral democracies: they organize the legislature, form governments, and citizens choose their representatives by voting for them. How citizens evaluate political parties and how well the parties that citizens evaluate positively perform thus provide useful tools to estimate the quality of representation from the individual’s perspective. We propose a measure that can be used to assess party preference representation at both the individual and aggregate levels, both in government and in parliament. We calculate the measure for over 160,000 survey respondents following 111 legislative elections held in 38 countries. We find little evidence that the party preferences of different socio-economic groups are systematically over or underrepresented. However, we show that citizens on the right tend to have higher representation scores than their left-wing counterparts. We also find that whereas proportional systems do not produce higher levels of representation on average, they reduce variance in representation across citizens.

Replacing FPTP

Canada’s use of the First-Past-the-Post electoral system has been defended due to its simplicity, constituency representation, and inherent stability. Arguments have been raised, however, that the system does not sufficiently represent Canadian demographics in parliament, it renders opposition parties ineffective, smaller parties have trouble or are unable to win seats in parliament, and regionally-concentrated parties are encouraged over national based ones. It has been suggested that adding an element of proportionality would address some of these issues. This paper seeks to consider this claim by examining the political outcomes of proportional electoral systems. The literature review outlined that the use of proportional systems increased descriptive as well as geographic representation, and was positively linked to voter turnout.

Institutions, contexts, and ethnic violence in comparative perspective

Which combinations of government structures and electoral systems create better frameworks for addressing ethnic violence? Is there any one-size-fits-all institutional solution to violent ethnic conflict? Why or why not? These questions are of substantial importance to scholars and policymakers alike, but the extant literature does not provide a systematic and thorough exploration. In this article, we argue that the effects of political institutions on ethnic violence are moderated by parameters of ethnic configurations. Through a large comparative study, we find that institutions are relevant when ethnic groups are not geographically dispersed, and whether ethnic minorities face a majority group also matters. For concentrated minorities facing a majority, semi-presidential-proportional and presidential-proportional systems are more effective in reducing violence. In cases involving concentrated minorities facing no majority, parliamentary-non-proportional systems are associated with the most intense violence. We conclude that states seeking to alleviate ethnic violence by institutional engineering must take contexts seriously.

Mehrheitswahl mit Verhältnisausgleich statt personalisierter Verhältniswahl. Ein alternativer Reformvorschlag zur Verkleinerung des Bundestags

The Federal German Electoral Law allots 299 constituency and 299 party list parliamentary seats or more . The personalized proportional representation (PR) system prescribes party list votes as the dominant principle of seat distribution . In this article a plurality system with additional PR seats is advocated . It would, for instance, fix the number of PR seats to 299 . Here three rules that are actually used in mixed‑member proportional systems are discussed: (1) Total negative vote transfer from candidate to party votes (scorporo totale in Italy), (2) partial negative vote transfer of only candidate votes that assured constituency victory (votes of first loser plus one), (3) applying d’Hondt to party votes for gaining PR seats by adding the number of gained constituency seats to the denominator of the sequential divisions (Scottish Parliament) . Contrafactual seat distributions based on the 2017 election results are computed . The thesis is that voters are guided primarily by their policy preferences when choosing parties and by leadership competence when choosing their local representative and indirectly the future chancellor .