Closed-list Proportional Representation Research Articles

The best at the top? Candidate ranking strategies under closed list proportional representation

Abstract Under closed-list proportional representation, a party's electoral list determines the order in which legislative seats are allocated to candidates. When candidates differ in their ability, parties face a trade-off between competence and incentives. Ranking candidates in decreasing order of competence ensures that elected politicians are most competent. Yet, party lists create incentives for candidates that may lead parties not to place their best candidates at the top of the list. We examine this trade-off in a game-theoretical model in which parties rank their candidates on a list, candidates choose their campaign effort, and the election is a team contest for multiple prizes. We analyze how the candidates’ objectives, voters’ attention and media coverage, incumbency, the number of parties competing in the election, and the electoral environment influence how parties rank candidates.

Comparative politics with intraparty candidate selection

Politicians respond to incentives when they decide how to allocate their campaigning time and effort. The literature suggests electoral rules impact politicians’ incentives. We argue that the candidate selection process is an equally important source of incentives. We develop a two-stage model in which parties select candidates before the election. Elections are under first past the post (FPTP) or closed list proportional representation (PR). Selection is competitive or non-competitive. When selection is not competitive, effort is higher under FPTP. With competitive selection, effort is higher under PR as, under PR, competition motivates candidates to exert effort to be selected (as under FPTP) and to be ranked higher on the list. The results point to a causal relationship between electoral rules and how parties organize. They suggest empirical studies comparing electoral rules should consider how parties organize.

Does Electoral Reform Change MPs’ Behavior? Evidence from Romania

The article illustrates that legislators’ constituency orientation can be enhanced through electoral system personalization, even in political systems that have used the party-centered closed list proportional representation for several elections. Leveraging a quasi-natural experiment, created by the 2008 electoral reform in Romania, the study investigates the frequency and determinants of parliamentary questions dealing with constituency issues and whether the reform has stimulated different forms of responsiveness toward constituents. The analyses run on a matched sample of legislators show that while the reform has not modified the proportion of all constituency questions, it has increased substantially the share of questions inspired by allocation responsiveness. Moreover, the effects of some determinants of constituency orientation changed after the reform: previous socialization in local politics loses its significance while we also observe an increased negative effect of non-local candidatures.

Constituency Effects and Legislative Dissent Under Closed-List Proportional Representation

ABSTRACTAccording to conventional wisdom, closed-list proportional representation (CLPR) electoral systems create incentives for legislators to favor the party line over their voters’ positions. However, electoral incentives may induce party leaders to tolerate “shirking” by some legislators, even under CLPR. This study argues that in considering whose deviations from the party line should be tolerated, party leaders exploit differences in voters’ relative electoral influence resulting from malapportionment. We expect defections in roll call votes to be more likely among legislators elected from overrepresented districts than among those from other districts. We empirically test this claim using data on Argentine legislators’ voting records and a unique dataset of estimates of voters’ and legislators’ placements in a common ideological space. Our findings suggest that even under electoral rules known for promoting unified parties, we should expect strategic defections to please voters, which can be advantageous for the party’s electoral fortunes.

Why Geographically-Targeted Spending Under Closed-List Proportional Representation Favors Marginal Districts

Research on geographically-targeted spending under closed-list proportional representation (CLPR) is characterized by debate over whether ruling parties target core supporters or swing voters. We show that when CLPR is used in multiple districts and separate competitions are conducted in each, parties can reverse the formula through which votes are converted into seats to calculate how many additional votes they need to capture an additional seat. This enables parties to rank districts according to how close they are to winning an additional seat. We then show that under divisor-based formulae, parties will find they need fewer additional votes to capture another seat in districts where they captured fewer seats (‘marginal districts’). We posit that in these systems, ruling parties will steer geographically-targeted spending toward marginal PR districts and we present evidence of this from Japan.

The Best at the Top? Candidate Ranking Strategies Under Closed List Proportional Representation

Under closed-list proportional representation, a party's electoral list determines the order in which legislative seats are allocated to candidates. When candidates differ in their ability, parties face a trade-off between competence and incentives. Ranking candidates in decreasing order of competence ensures that elected politicians are most competent. Yet, party lists create incentives for candidates that may push parties not to rank candidates in decreasing competence order. We examine this trade-off in a game-theoretical model in which parties rank their candidate on a list, candidates choose their campaign effort, and the election is a team contest for multiple prizes. We show that the trade-off between competence and incentives depends on candidates’' objective and the electoral environment. In particular, parties rank candidates in decreasing order of competence if candidates value enough post-electoral high offices or media coverage focuses on candidates at the top of the list.

IMF = I’M Fired! IMF Program Participation, Political Systems, and Workers’ Rights

How do International Monetary Fund programs and conditions affect labor rights? Recognizing the diversity of International Monetary Fund conditionality, we argue that the more stringent International Monetary Fund labor market conditionality is, the worse labor rights become. However, this negative effect can be mitigated if there exist domestic political institutions that have incentives and abilities to provide protections over workers: one such case is a closed-list proportional representation system; another case is a leftist government that relies on political supports of workers. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that the more labor conditionality a program includes, the worse labor rights the country sustains. In addition, we report that the negative effect is partially mitigated when domestic political circumstances are favorable to the political representation of workers under a proportional representation system or under a leftist government.

The personal vote and party cohesion: Modeling the effects of electoral rules on intraparty politics

Conventional wisdom suggests that parties in candidate-centered electoral systems should be associated with less cohesive policy preferences among legislators. We model the incentives of party leaders to achieve voting unity accounting for the costs of discipline, showing that candidate-centered systems have the counterintuitive effect of promoting party agreement on policies and preference cohesion. These implications for cohesion derive from the degree of control over list rank held by leaders under open lists (open-list proportional representation, OLPR) and closed lists (closed-list proportional representation, CLPR). Because discipline is costlier in OLPR, owing to leaders’ lack of control over list rank, leaders seeking voting unity propose policies that promote agreement between members and leadership. Under CLPR, however, leaders can more easily achieve voting unity by relying on discipline and therefore lack incentives to promote internal agreement. We then extend the model to allow the party leader to replace members, showing that preference cohesion itself is greater under OLPR. Further, our baseline results hold when allowing legislative behavior to affect vote share and when accounting for candidates’ valence qualities. We interpret our results to suggest that candidate-centered systems result in stronger incentives for developing programmatic parties, compared with party-centered systems.

Does Local Representation Matter?

We investigate whether geographic representation affects local voting behavior in closed-list proportional representation (PR) systems, where conventional theoretical wisdom suggests a limited role of localism in voter preferences. Using detailed data on Norwegian parliamentary candidates’ hometowns, we show that parties engage in geographic balancing when constructing candidate lists. However, because most districts contain more municipalities than seats, not all municipalities will ultimately see a local candidate elected. A regression discontinuity design applied to marginal candidates reveals that parties obtain higher within-district support in subsequent elections in incumbents’ hometowns—novel evidence of “friends-and-neighbors” voting in an otherwise party-centered environment. Exploring the mechanisms, we find that represented municipalities often continue to have locally-connected candidates in top positions, in contrast to municipalities with losing candidates, and are more frequently referenced in legislative speeches. There is no evidence that unequal representation creates inequalities in distributive policies.

Understanding Legislative Speech in the Turkish Parliament: Reconsidering the Electoral Connection under Proportional Representation

AbstractWe aim to address two weaknesses of the growing literature on legislative debate and legislative behaviour. First, most studies on legislative speech focus on the role of party unity and individual dissent on speech-making behaviour and largely ignore the role of legislators’ own calculations regarding their electoral vulnerability. Secondly, research on legislative behaviour that studies mechanisms other than legislative speech usually explores the role of electoral incentives where there is Single Member District (SMD) or open list system, and largely neglects closed list proportional representation systems with multi-member districts. We suggest that, similar to SMD and single transferable vote systems, the electoral vulnerability of individual legislators provides incentives to nurture a personal reputation and signals their efforts to their constituents and party leadership. Using a novel dataset of parliamentary speeches in the Turkish Parliament (2007–2011), we demonstrate that legislators who are electorally more vulnerable participate more in legislative debate, and are more likely to deliver constituency-related speeches.

Parties, Candidates, and Gendered Political Recruitment in Closed-List Proportional Representation Systems: The Case of Spain

Throughout the world, the number of women elected to legislatures has risen dramatically. Most of the quantitative research explaining party, district, or national differences has focused on the aggregate rather than the candidate level thereby overlooking women’s access to party ballots. In examining both the election and selection stages, we focus on Spain, a closed-list proportional representation system where parties have tight control over their ballots and the election of candidates is largely a function of rank orders on the ballot. In this South European democracy women’s representation in the national parliament has experienced an incremental track, reaching 39 percent in 2016. Party differences in gender outcomes and policies promoting equal gender representation did not vanish once a legislated quota was introduced in 2007. The empirical analysis builds on an original set of candidate longitudinal data covering nine elections held between 1986 and 2016. Specifically, we test how party and candidate factors differentially affect the selection of men and women to party ballots and their likelihood of getting elected. We show that strategic discrimination against female candidates affects all parties and it happens irrespective of candidates’ political experience, which explains why male overrepresentation has been significantly reduced but not overturned.

Looking for locals under a closed-list proportional representation system: The case of Portugal

Parties' motivation to include locals depends on the characteristics of the electoral system. This article analyzes where on the lists parties choose to position locals under closed-list proportional representation systems. Furthermore, it also investigates how that choice varies depending on two key district factors, namely district magnitude and whether or not the district is in a peripheral region. To that end, it draws on an original biographical data set of candidates for the Portuguese National Parliament (1983, 1995, 2002, 2005 and 2009). The findings show that there are fewer locals among the higher positions on the candidates' lists and among heads of lists. District magnitude and peripheral region effects go in the expected direction, but these effects are small.

Local Candidates and Distributive Politics Under Closed-List Proportional Representation

Geographic representation is an important consideration in candidate nominations, even under closed-list proportional representation (PR), and may even matter for distributive policy outcomes. However, since nominations are determined strategically, the causal effects of local representation are difficult to identify. We investigate the relationship between local representation and electoral and distributive politics in the closed-list PR setting of Norway. Exploiting as-good-as-random election outcomes for marginal candidates, we find that parties obtain higher support in subsequent elections in the hometowns of narrowly-elected candidates. This effect appears to be driven by the local candidate appearing at the top of the party list in the next election. However, we find no evidence that representation results in geographically targeted policy benefits going to the candidates’ hometowns.

Measuring re-election prospects across electoral systems: a general approach applied to Germany

This research note presents a general approach for measuring the electoral safety of individual MPs across electoral systems that is based on predicted re-election probabilities estimated from multilevel logistic regression models. In contrast to existing measures, this method yields estimates on an intuitive and readily comparable probability scale, captures the higher sensitivity of re-election prospects to electoral change in the range of close races, and can accommodate regional differences in context conditions such as volatility. The paper implements the approach for two archetypical electoral systems – first-past-the-post (FPTP) systems and closed-list proportional representation (PR) – and estimates re-election prospects for the FPTP and PR tiers of the German mixed electoral system in all Bundestag elections since 1957. While the empirical data presented here is mainly illustrative, the concluding section highlights various questions that future research can address with the new measure.

The Legislative Logic of Electoral Reform in Ukraine

Since the end of Communist rule, Ukraine has undertaken three major electoral reforms, moving from a single-member district majoritarian system, to a mixed-member system, to a closed-list proportional representation system, and back to the mixed-member system. Some argue that political parties are primarily motivated by the desire to maximise seats or improve their ability to impact on policy. I argue that existing theories of electoral reform often assume that parties are unitary actors during electoral reform. My analysis of electoral reform in Ukraine clearly demonstrates significant intra-party dissonance on electoral system preferences. This result questions the usefulness of the party unity assumption.

Legislative Equilibria and Economic Policy under Alternative Electoral Rules

This paper develops a game theoretic model in which S incumbent legislators simultaneously allocate effort between producing non-excludable public goods, targeting local goods to particular geographic constituencies, and engaging in rent-seeking. The game’s equilibria are determined by both the profile of the electorate and the electoral institution in place. Closed-List Proportional Representation (CLPR) is characterized by a fundamental collective action problem which leads to high levels of shirking among incumbent legislators. Single-Member District (SMD) systems are effective at resolving this collective action problem when voters are highly responsive to public good provision. Open-List Proportional Representation (OLPR) systems are effective at resolving this collective action problem when voters exhibit low responsiveness to public policy. Indeed, OLPR generates high levels of policy effort in electoral contexts where both CLPR and SMD systems are characterized by high rent-seeking. The model provides a wide range of implications for future empirical studies of the relationship between electoral institutions and economic policy.

Adapting to closed-list proportional representation: lessons from Ukraine

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the implications of Ukraine’s move from a mixed electoral system to one of proportional representation in the 2006 parliamentary elections. In particular, it seeks to understand how the elimination of district contests affected the two major parties’ strategies in selecting candidates. Two strategies are outlined: prioritizing inclusion and prioritizing cohesion. Under the former, parties co-opt unaffiliated district deputies to improve their electoral fortunes despite potential costs to party discipline. The latter involves parties selecting affiliated deputies on the expectation of greater loyalty if elected. The analysis reveals that while the ruling party, Our Ukraine, employed a cautious version of inclusion, its opponent, the Party of Regions, emphasized cohesion. The findings show that “one size does not fit all” when it comes to how parties react to the introduction of list-only systems. Furthermore, given the greater subsequent success of The Party of Regions in gaining office, the results question the degree to which ruling parties benefit electorally from greater inclusion when responding to the advent of more proportional electoral rules.

Local favoritism in at-large proportional representation systems

Pork barrel spending is typically attributed to the strategic behavior of political elites hoping to be electorally rewarded by voters residing in their districts. Such behavior is expected to depend on the incentives imposed by the electoral system. We estimate the causal effect of local representation in a closed-list proportional representation system where individual candidates have no clear electoral incentive to favor their hometown. Using data from Norwegian regional governments, we still find a hometown bias. We document that municipalities with a representative on the regional council from the same party as the regional governor tend to obtain more funding for local investments. Citizens also tend to vote more often for parties whose gubernatorial candidate is from their own hometown, consistent with expectations of particularistic benefits. A possible explanation is that regional council members are often recruited from local politics and remain loyal to their roots. We find no evidence that regional council experience affects politicians' future career prospects at the local level.

How Proportional Representation Frames Pork Barrel Efforts: District Magnitude, Ballot Type and Position on the List Interactions

I focus on pork barrel efforts, i.e. legislators’ actions to seek local public goods for their constituencies. Efforts in closed-list and open-list proportional representation are better explained as the interaction of district magnitude (M) and list position. In closed-list systems efforts will be greater when M is very small and as M increases they will describe a concave distribution at the list level. In open list systems efforts increase the larger the M and for legislators elected in the closest positions to the top of the list. I test this argument using an original dataset of bills initiation in the Honduran Congress between 1990 and 2009. In 2004, Honduras shifted from closed-list to open-list while maintaining district magnitude constant.

The Effect of Electoral Systems on Voter Turnout: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

I exploit the unique institutional framework of Spanish local elections, where municipalities follow different electoral systems depending on their population size, as mandated by a national law. Using a regression discontinuity design, I compare turnout under closed-list proportional representation and under an open-list, plurality-at-large system where voters can vote for individual candidates from the same or different party lists. I find that the open-list system increases turnout by between one and two percentage points. The results suggest that open-list systems, which introduce competition both across and within parties, are conducive to greater voter turnout.