Studying Electoral Institutions and their Consequences: Electoral Systems and Electoral Laws (original) (raw)
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Electoral rules have fascinated politicians and political scientists for decades, because they are commonly assumed to condition the chances of success of competing parties or candidates. This chapter covers one important set of electoral rules, namely the electoral system, which defines how votes are cast and seats allocated. Other sets of rules, such as those concerning the use of referenda, the control of election spending, and the regulation of political broadcasting, are dealt with in other chapters. We first document the great diversity of electoral systems presently existing among democracies. This raises the question of whether electoral systems matter, of what concrete impact they have on political life. The second section thus examines the political consequences of electoral laws. Once these consequences are known, we are in a position to tackle the crucial normative question of which is the best electoral system. The third section of the chapter reviews the debate and identifies the major tradeoffs involved in the choice of an electoral system. D i v e r s i t y o f e l e c t o r a l s y s t e m s Even scholars specialized in the field are amazed by the diversity and complexity of contemporary electoral systems. The rules that govern how votes are cast and seats allocated differ markedly from one country to another. Selecting an electoral system is not a purely technical decision. It may have huge consequences for the operation of the political system. As discussed in the following section of the chapter, applying two different formulas to the same distribution of votes will produce quite different outcomes in terms of members elected for each party. To give a concrete example, let us look at the critical British election of 1983, the first election in a major nation where voters were passing judgment 2
Studying electoral systems - methodological aspects
2016
Studying electoral systems — methodological aspects The concept of electoral deformation is conventional and its content is dependent on the given definition of representative democracy. Representative democracy’s aim to achieve social volition is not fully achievable. The category of ‘majority’ is strictly an instrument of forming public authority and it cannot be equated with an expression of a given volition of the society’s majority. All election systems deform, and the differences between them lie in the scale of that deformation. Electoral deformations are not only a consequence of the majority system, whether proportional or mixed. The author points in this regard to the deformations that stem from the legal ground-rules of election law in the form of a general, equal, secret, direct and free ballot. Further, he points to the relations between the size of an electorate and the size of the organs being elected, the stability of the election law, voter turnout rates, the role o...
Comparative Electoral Systems Research: The Maturation of a Field and New Challenges Ahead
The Politics of Electoral Systems, 2005
In 1985, when Arend Lijphart undertook a survey of the literature, he concluded that the field of comparative electoral systems was underdeveloped. Now, I believe we can speak of a mature field. This maturity is reflected in the publication of several important books and the rapid increase in the number of journal articles published on the general topic of electoral systems. We have seen the rise to prominence of specialized journals that focus on elections, parties, or democracy more generally, and each of these has become a prominent venue for the publication of articles on electoral systemsexamples include Electoral Studies, which began publication in 1982, Representation (1995) 1 , and the somewhat more general Journal of Democracy (1990) and Party Politics (1995)-as well as the increasing presence of the field in the major mainstream journals of the discipline. In this chapter I shall review several strands of the literature, focusing mostly on the period after about 1990, and identify what I take to be both the major accomplishments of the field, as well as some areas in which its development is still lagging. If we look back to the early years of the field of comparative electoral systems, we find that the earliest works were largely either descriptive or advocacy pieces. One example of a descriptive work is Charles Seymour's How the World Votes (1918), which is a magisterial two-volume cataloguing of electoral systems then in existence, but which offers little in the way of generalizations about effects of different rules. In the category of advocacy works, several stand out. In 1859, T. Hare presented a proposal for a new electoral system for Great Britain and Ireland. J.S. Mill (1861), in his Considerations on Representative Government, promoted Hare's idea, which was essentially what we now know as the single transferable vote (STV), and which Ireland has used since its independence in 1922. Mill argued against the idea of representation based solely on geography-as in plurality rule, particularly in single-seat districts, which is still the electoral system used today in Great Britain, as well as in Canada, India, the United States, and many other countries with British heritage. Mill promoted the idea of representation based instead on voters' viewpoints on the issues of the day. That is, Mill provides an early rationale for proportional representation (PR), which would be adopted by a large number of countries in Europe over the subsequent decades. Interestingly, while Mill and other authors who advocated PR almost uniformly have favored STV, it is party-list PR that is by far the dominant form of PR in the world. Mill's work was the spur for a "first generation" of comparative electoral-system research that includes Hoag and Hallet (1926), simply entitled Proportional Representation. Hoag and Hallet's book is a work of advocacy in that it makes the case that the "worst" form of PR (list PR) is superior to the "best" form of majority voting (held to be the alternative vote, which uses transferable votes like STV, but in pursuit of a single majority winner). The book is particularly interesting today for the way in which it traces the early history of electoral-reform movements in a wide range of countries and in how it captures the almost missionary zeal of the reformers. Like Hoag and Hallet, Lakeman and Lambert (1955), in Voting and Democracies, explicitly favor STV. Lakeman and Lambert additionally offered a rejoinder to the view, commonly held at the The edited volumes include a remarkable series growing out of several Irvine Conferences on Political Economy: Grofman, Lee, Winckler, and Woodall (1999), on the single nontransferable vote in East Asia; Bowler and Grofman (2000) on the single transferable vote in Australia, Ireland, and Malta; Shugart and Wattenberg (2001) on mixed-member electoral systems; Grofman and Lijphart (2002) on proportional representation in the Nordic countries; and a forthcoming volume on variations in redistricting practices in various countries using single-seat districts. No review of books on electoral systems would be complete without mentioning the great improvement in the accessibility of data. Without the raw data-seats and votes, as well as numbers of eligible voters, and the dates of elections and electoral-law changes-the field simply cannot advance. As recently as the mid 1980s, finding data on all but the most advanced democracies was challenging, and sometimes even collecting data on the advanced democracies involved searching multiple sources. Now, there are multiple volumes and serials containing basic election data, including Nohlen, Krennerich, and Thibaut (1999), and Nohlen, Grotz, and Hartman (2001), as well as the annual updates to Mackie and Rose (1991) found in the pages of the European Journal of Political Research and the regular elections reports in Electoral Studies, Representation, and the Journal of Democracy. Additionally, the Colomer (2004) volume contains a wealth of basic data on the history of rules changes worldwide. Among journal articles, the proliferation of studies can be demonstrated by the results of a search of the Current Contents on-line database for the term, "electoral system" (or its plural), in their title or abstract. Over 400 citations turn up, just for the period 1990-2003. Of course, a large percentage of these are single-country studies that do not attempt to generate or test general hypotheses, and a smaller number mean something different than the set of rules for seat allocation. 3 Nonetheless, this rough count reveals a vibrant community of scholars interested in the mechanisms by which votes are translated into political power. In the reviews that follow, necessarily I take a selective view of journal articles, concentrating mainly on those that are explicitly comparative. I will include as "comparative" those that look at the effects of electoral reform in one country, as these are comparing two electoral systems even if they are not comparing two or more countries. In fact, such studies are outstanding examples of theoretically significant research inasmuch as they allow much to be held constant, and thus help us to understand both the power of electoral rules and their limits to changing political behavior.
In this review article, I identify the key questions raised by the treatment of electoral systems not as causal influences on party systems but as effects or byproducts of party systems. Framing these questions in the context of the classic consequences-oriented study of electoral institutions, I first review the classic approach, which treats electoral systems as causes, and explore the potential implications when electoral systems are viewed instead as outcomes of party systems. I then survey a variety of principal explanations of the origins and change of electoral laws, followed by a focus on several of the more explicitly defined models of this process. I conclude by discussing—and contesting—the notion that except for exceptional founding episodes of institutional choice, electoral systems eventually stabilize as equilibrium institutions.
Elections and Voters, 2009
This is a preprint of Chapter 3 of Cees van der Eijk and Mark Franklin's Elections and Voters, later published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009
The Underlying Assumptions of Electoral Systems
Studies in Choice and Welfare, 2011
I propose a twofold classification of the main considerations underlying the choice of an election procedure: political criteria on the one hand, and social-choice criteria on the other. I formulate political dichotomies, each combination of which narrows down the choice of procedure to a sub-class of the class of all procedures. I discuss what social-choice theory has to offer in each of these.
From Duverger to Cox, and beyond: The State-of-the-Art in Electoral Law Studies
Japanese Journal of Political Science, 2000
Prior to its publication, Gary Cox's Making Votes Count was widely and eagerly anticipated. (Indeed, some years ago, I received a referee report dismissing my submission as unnecessary because superior analysis would eventually appear in Cox's then forthcoming manuscript.) Upon its release in 1998, the book was instantly lauded: it collected multiple awards, including the prestigious Woodrow Wilson prize for best book published on government, politics, or international affairs. This acclaim was scarcely surprising ± Cox has been one of the foremost scholars of elections and legislatures for the whole of his professional career. He is responsible for an impressive body of work spanning multiple research topics, nations, and methods of analysis. This book is testimony to his breadth, as it catalogs the key electoral features of virtually the whole set of modern democracies (more than 70), and makes frequent forays into diverse nations in search of empirical support for novel theoretical ®ndings. In brief, Cox's project is to bring together a large formal, deductive literature on voting rules and social choice with an equally voluminous empirical, inductive literature on elections and party systems in the world's democracies. The prizes it garnered are one measure of the book's success at this merger; a large boost in Cox's swelling citation count will doubtless follow, reiterating the judgement that this is the major work on electoral law and voting to date. And yet, a few years after the book's release, a second look reinforces the sense that political scientists still know surprisingly little about how electoral institutions constrain the behaviour of parties, candidates, and voters. Cox's work marks a frontier, but there is a vast amount of uncharted territory just beyond. From a purely descriptive vantage point, consider that Cox (with few exceptions) examines only lower houses of national legislatures in the very recent past. He thus omits many interesting cases and vast amounts of data. And, importantly, he de®nes out of his scope the neglected question of how multiple electoral environments ± as produced by federalism, bicameralism, supranationalism, subsidiarity, and so on ±
Electoral Systems - A Discussion
Support my work: https://buy.stripe.com/cN24jE2Qvfum10ceUV In this essay I will answer the question of which electoral system (I believe) is best and why. I will begin by first laying out a summary of the main types of systems currently used; relying mainly on the highly impressive work of Blaise (1991) and Norris (1997). I will base my argument for which system is best based on three criteria: popular power, representation and potential for danger.