Achieving Proportional Representation In A Reproductive Health Survey Through Social Media: Process And Recommendations

Background: The narrative surrounding women’s reproductive health has shifted from a medical model to an emphasis on reproductive well-being over different life-stages. We developed and piloted a tracker survey for monitoring women’s reproductive health and well-being in England, recruiting respondents online. This paper reports on the success of the online recruitment strategies in achieving a sample proportionally representative of the England general population.Methods: Recruitment was through Facebook and Instagram advertisements and dissemination through Twitter and a blog. At the end week one, the sample was reviewed and compared to the 2011 Census England population. From week two, recruitment targeted under-represented groups. Key data were compared with prevalence estimates from the Third National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal-3).Results: Between 1 July-17 August 2021, 13,962 people initiated the online survey, with 11,578 completing it. Numbers were low initially, but peaked at 1700 survey initiations per day after increasing the daily advertisement budget on day seven. At the end of week one, minority ethnic groups and people without a degree or equivalent were under-represented. From week two, we altered the advertisement settings to show to people whose profile indicated they were a ‘high school leaver’ had ‘up to some high school’, worked in industries that do not typically require a degree or lived in local authorities with a high proportion of ethnic minority residents. This had a modest effect, with the final sample short of proportional representation in terms of ethnicity and education but close in terms of region and age. Compared to Natsal-3, we found consistency in the proportion of respondents reporting an abortion and a live birth in the last year, however, the proportion of our sample reporting ever having experienced infertility was significantly higher than in Natsal-3, as was the proportion of ‘planned’ pregnancies in the last year.Conclusions: It is possible to recruit large numbers of respondents online, relatively quickly, to complete a reproductive health survey. This will be valuable to track reproductive health and well-being at a national level over time. More work is needed to understand reasons for non-response among under-represented groups.

Party-related primacy effects in proportional representation systems: evidence from a natural experiment in Polish local elections

We study the primacy effects that occur when voters cast their votes because a candidate or party is listed first on a ballot. In the elections that we analyzed, there are three potential types of such effects that might occur when voters vote for (1) the first candidate listed on the ballot in single-member district (SMD) elections (candidate primacy); (2) the first party listed on the ballot in open-list proportional representation (OLPR) elections (party primacy); or (3) the first candidate on a party list in OLPR elections (list primacy). We estimated the party primacy effect (2) and established that there was no interaction between (2) and (3). A party primacy effect is especially difficult to estimate because parties’ positions on ballots are typically fixed in all multi-member districts (MMDs) and it is impossible to separate the first-position “bonus” from a party’s normal electoral performance. A rare natural experiment allowed us to estimate the primacy party bonus between 6.02 and 8.52% of all votes cast for the 2014 Polish local elections. We attribute the large size of such bonus to the great complexity of voting in the OLPR elections, especially the much longer ballots, voting in many simultaneous elections, and ballot design as a booklet rather than a sheet.

Two and a Half Crises: Serbian Institutional Design as the Cause of Democratic Declines

This article investigates the effects of Serbian semi-presidentialism and the proportional representation electoral system on democratic performances. Both electoral and political systems provide incentives for power-sharing mechanisms and the pluralistic character of the party system. However, in situations when one party becomes much stronger and predominant, there is a growing probability for the presidentialization of politics and excessive centralization of power that might lead to competitive authoritarianism. I am analysing three such cases from different periods – Milošević regime (1990–2000), the first transitional decade (2000–2012) and the return of the old regime (2012–2020) in order to identify causes of democratic crises that are embedded in institutional design.

Electoral systems and income inequality: a tale of political equality

The link between democracy and within-country income inequality remains an unresolved quest in the literature of political economy. To look into this debate, I propose exploring the implications of electoral systems, rather than political regimes, on income inequality. I surmise that proportional representation systems should be associated with lower income inequality than majoritarian or mixed systems. Further, I conjecture that the relationship between electoral systems and income inequality hinges on the de facto distribution of real political power, namely political equality. I use data on 85 countries covering the period 1960–2016 and specify models able to capture the persistence and mean reversion of income inequality. The estimates fail to significantly associate democracy with income inequality, and find other political institutions to significantly shape income inequality. The paper finds a robust association between more proportional systems and lower income inequality. However, this association depends on political equality. Changes towards proportional representation systems seem to lower income inequality at low and medium levels of political equality. Strikingly, instrumental variable estimates show that changes in electoral systems in political equal societies increases income inequality.

Japan

This chapter explores patterns in legislative speech in the House of Representatives of Japan from 1996 to 2017. In the two main arenas of legislative debate—plenary sessions and committee meetings—the inter-party dimension of speech is characterized by the disproportionate share of speaking activity by opposition parties, as well as the dominant Liberal Democratic Party’s junior coalition partner, Kōmeitō. Within parties, senior members and leaders speak more than others in plenary debates, where debate time is more limited. Backbenchers, including those who lost a single-member district (SMD) race but won a seat through the proportional representation (PR) tier of the mixed-member majoritarian electoral system, are relatively more active in committees. Although women are under-represented in terms of seats, they are not significantly under-represented in terms of relative speaking activity in either arena.

TP8.2.20 Gongs galore: phaleristic study of the relative risk of a healing art related new-year honour

Aims To compare proportional representation of healthcare specialty workers, in receipt of New Year honours (NYHs) and examine system bias. Methods Observational study of recipients of NYHs from 2010 to 2019 within the UK honours system including comparative analysis of proportional representation of the UK medical workforce Absolute risk of receiving a NYH, related to medical specialty, gender, and geographical region. Relative Risk (RR) of receiving an NYH for services to healthcare related to specialty. Results 11 207 NYHs were bestowed, with 368 (3.3%) awarded to healthcare professionals: 212 (57.6%) women, 156 (42.4%) men. The RR of a healthcare professional receiving a NYH was 0.76 (95% CI 0.68 to 0.84, p < 0.001) when compared with the remaining UK workforce. Doctors received most NYHs (n = 181), with Public Health, Clinical Oncology, and General Medicine specialties most likely to be rewarded (RR 20.35 (CI 9.61 to 43.08, p < 0.001), 8.43 (CI 2.70 to 26.30, p < 0.001) and 8.22 (CI 6.22 to 10.86, p < 0.001)) respectively; Anaesthetists received fewest NYHs (RR 0.52 (0.13 to 2.10), p = 0.305). Men were more likely to receive NYHs than women (OR 0.44, 95%CI 0.36 to 0.54; p < 0.001). Two hundred and fifty-four NYHs (69.0%) were bestowed on residents of England (60, 16.3% London), 49 (13.3%) Scotland (p = 0.003), 39 (10.6%) Wales (p < 0.001), and 26 (7.1%) Northern-Ireland (p < 0.001). Conclusions Relative risk of receiving a NYH varied over 150-fold by specialty, two-fold by gender, and three-fold by geographical location. Public Health Physicians are perceived to be the pick of the parade.

Proportional Representation System Whether Significance for Bangladesh: An Analysis

The purpose of this article is to ensure free, fair and credible election by adopting electoral reformation, switch from `Winner Take All” (WTA) to Proportional Representation (PR) system. In Bangladesh the election process and election result both have been questioned. Nevertheless, election is one of the key components in ensuring democracy. Particularly the free, fair and credible election is one of the basic and crucial prerequisites and elements of democratic government and governance. Bangladesh, we found an under developed political culture, lack of democratic political organizations, institutions and practices in true sense. All these indicators have been almost failed to institutionalize democracy in Bangladesh. In this backdrop, this paper attempts to explain that, a switch from the current Winner Takes All (WTA) system to Proportional Representation (PR) system can reshape the election system by keeping consistency, because of the fact that the democracy means the rule of the majority but the minority can't be uprooted as well as Proportional Representation (PR) method can help stabilize democracy in Bangladesh.