Electoral Institutions and Political Competition: Coordination, Persuasion and Mobilization

Abstract

In the Schumpeterian conception, democracy consists of regular and non-violent competition for control of government between alternative teams of elites (Schumpeter 1942). The question that much scholarship in electoral studies addresses, and on which this essay will focus, is: how does changing the rules of the electoral game change the strategies of parties and candidates, hence the outcome of elections? Figure 1 illustrates both the sequence of events in a stylized democracy and some of the topics to be covered. In the beginning, there is a set of potential electoral competitors. These agents decide (at stage 1 of the diagram) whether to enter a particular electoral competition—that is, to formally nominate candidates for one or more elective offices. Since winning office requires amassing a sufficient number of votes, the nature of the entry game between potential competitors has a strong coordination game flavor to it.1 For example, if fifteen right-of-center parties all enter the race as separate competitors, while the left unites behind a single option, the right is likely to do poorly (under most extant electoral systems). The right can do better if some potential competitors withdraw in favor of others, but each potential competitor may prefer that it remain and the others withdraw. After a given set of competitors have entered the race, each decides to allocate effort to one or more of three vote-producing activities: (2.1) persuasion: providing voters with reasons, such as better policy positions or larger bribes, to prefer it to the other competitors; (2.2) vote coordination: convincing supporters of other parties that the expected utility of their vote, in terms of affecting the allocation of seats across competitors, will be higher if they support it than if they support their most-preferred competitor; (2.3) mobilization: boosting the probability that its known supporters will actually participate in the election.