Electoral System Design Research Articles

The cost of proportional representations in electoral system design

We present an impossibility result concerning the design of dual vote electoral systems that meet three key conditions: proportional party representation, proportional local representation, and local accountability. By identifying the necessary number of compensatory seats to meet these three conditions in dual vote systems, we show that the number is not bounded in general; thus, it can be very costly to achieve the three conditions. When a cap is applied to the total seats, combined with a district-decentralization, semi-compensatory dual vote systems that distribute the limited compensatory seats to enhance proportionality become vulnerable to strategic manipulations. Specifically, when political parties seek to maximize their legislative representation, they might employ the strategy of creating ‘decoy’ party lists.

Rokkan Rules? Communist Elites and the Choice of Electoral Systems in the Yugoslav Republics, 1989–1990

We use the previously neglected cases of the Yugoslav republics to revisit the question of how electoral systems were formed for the first elections during the transition from communism in 1989–1990. By exploring archival and other sources created contemporaneously by the relevant decision-makers, we build on Rokkanian interpretations of electoral system design. Unlike Rokkan, however, we do not see parties as unitary or united actors. Our analysis instead focuses on the leadership and the dominant wings of the ruling parties and shows that their preferences regarding electoral rules served their intra-party ambitions and reflected their intra-party power capacities.

MAJOR ELECTORAL SYSTEMS IN THE WORLD: A CRITICAL EVALUATION

This topic is an effort to assess if electoral systems in vogue in sub-continent are the only options available or there or some other systems too that may be given serious consideration keeping in view political challenges in the area. Electoral system design is regarded as the highest level of policy intervention to improve public delivery. This intervention is highly technical, time taking and cautious as it substantially affects social fabric of the society. Perhaps, this might be the reason that different models and designs applicable in Europe have never been cogitated here. However, it is high time to research over Electoral systems available in the world and their pros and cons. Researchers have followed descriptive research design for the current research. Secondary data, primarily published by International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, has been used in this study. This research highlights that more efforts are required from ECP and Parliament to consider the application of different Electoral Systems in Pakistan. it might be helpful for better service delivery and electorates confidence over the system. Keywords: Electoral systems, Electoral system design, Electorates, Plurality / Majority System, Proportional System, Mixed System, Policy outcomes, policy effectiveness.

The Effects of the 2011 Electoral Reform on the Results of the Hungarian Legislative Elections I.

The second wave of democracy after World Wa II, followed by the third wave in the 1970’s andthe 80’s – including the historic democratic transitions in Eastern Europe after the collapseof the Soviet Empire – led to the expansion of democratic electoral systems around the world.The design of electoral systems and of the undergoing electoral reforms has become a vitalcomponent of the democratization process. The study of the theory and politics of electoralreform led to the adoption of new theoretical and methodological approaches in order to copewith the challenging phenomena.The main goal of this paper is to interpret the concept of reform, and to unfold some oftheoretical aspects of it in order to identify some of the main components of the concept. With the theoretical approach we can get a better understandic of the reform itself, and we candemonstrate that electoral reform is a complex process which should not be reduced to a simplisticmodel in which a few actors driven by a few motives can fully explain the whole phenomenon.The theoretical study of the reform can show that some politial events, the established partysystem (first and foremost the distribution of power between the various parties), the type of theactual electoral system (its advantages and disadvantages) as well as some contingents factorsmust be taken into consideration in order to have a better understanding of the nature of thepolitical arena in which reform proposals are promoted and the reform itself takes place.

Militant Democracy and the Minority to Majority Effect: on the Importance of Electoral System Design

Impact of electoral system design on democratic self-defence – ‘informal’ (content neutral) militant democracy instrument – the minority to majority effect (assigning majoritarian power to political minorities) increases risk of democratic backsliding – minority to majority goes beyond conventional systemic dichotomies as majoritarianism versus proportionalism: outcome of diverse system features – resources and incentives as explanatory mechanisms – preliminary case studies – the limitations of institutional engineering

The Cost of Proportional Representations in Electoral System Design

The Cost of Proportional Representations in Electoral System Design

Judicialization of politics in Indonesia’s electoral system Case study: judicial review on threshold, balloting structure, and simultaneous election at constitutional court

Why does the judicial review process highly influence the electoral system design in Indonesia at the Constitutional Court? Whose interests and what kind of interests are served by the judicial review process at the Constitutional Court towards the electoral system in Indonesia? By analyzing constitutional court verdicts from its inception on August 13, 2003, until the beginning of 2020, this study tries to answer those two questions by using judicialization of political theory. This study found that the extension of the authority of the judicial institution to produce political decisions through the judicial review mechanism can be regarded as the opening of political opportunity structure as a new platform for political actors to achieve their interest in election regulations. For example, to meet one of the electoral systems, a political party is underwhelming variables like the parliamentary threshold requirement specified in the election law. They come to the Constitutional Court to request a judicial review on the threshold requirement and plead the Court to revoke the requirement. Meanwhile, civil society groups, which are not the direct participants of the election, will also utilize the medium provided by the Constitutional Court to challenge various provisions in the election law to create a more democratic electoral system. This study concludes that the Constitutional Court is seen as the guarding of constitutional law enforcement institutions and a power relations arena where different political actors strive to realize their political interests or agenda on election laws.

«Спящая реформа»: практики внедрения двухуровневой системы местного самоуправления и формирования депутатского корпуса в городских округах

The article is devoted to the comparative analysis of pilot implementation of a two-level local self-government system in city districts. Amendments to the Federal Law “On the General Principles of the Organization of Local Self-Government in the Russian Federation” were presented in 2014, where new types of municipalities – “city district with intra-city division” and “inside-city district” – were introduced. This legislative change was based on the idea of spreading a two-level model in order to bring the deputies closer to voters in large city districts. More than 70 cities had the potential for this reform, but only 3 of them – Chelyabinsk, Samara, and Makhachkala – took advantage of the opportunity. The authors reconstruct the design of local electoral systems in Chelyabinsk, Samara and Makhachkala before and after the reform, and analyze the change in the rate of representation in the reformed city districts in comparison with city districts (which are not municipalities) that are divided into precincts, but have not switched to the two-level local self-government model. Also the basic trends of forming deputies’ bodies as a sub-elite group among political class of the cities are examined. The reform resulted in the expansion of the municipal deputies body. A database of candidates for deputies and deputies from 2009 to 2020 created by the authors gives an opportunity to analyze the ways the collective portrait of the municipal political sub-elite transformed during the reform. The focus of the study is the dilemma of maintaining or abandoning the twolevel system that the regional authorities faced in 2019–2020. The authors answer the question about the reasons for the lack of attempts to scale the results of the reform to other regions or large cities in those regions where the pilot reform options were implemented.

Requiring Majority Winners for Congressional Elections: Harnessing Federalism to Combat Extremism

Congress should enact a law requiring a candidate for a seat in Congress to receive a majority of votes in order to win the election. Congress should let states determine what particular procedure to use to determine whether a candidate wins a majority, as there are significantly different methods of identifying a majority winner. While this simple piece of legislation might seem inconsequential—many Americans assume, erroneously, that elections already require majority winners—it in fact would cause states to undertake a form of experimentation in the details of electoral system design that would have the effect of counteracting the threat that anti-democracy extremism currently poses in America.

The Twitter parliamentarian database: Analyzing Twitter politics across 26 countries.

This article introduces the Twitter Parliamentarian Database (TPD), a multi-source and manually validated database of parliamentarians on Twitter. The TPD includes parliamentarians from all European Free Trade Association countries where over 45% of parliamentarians are on Twitter as well as a selection of English-speaking countries. The database is designed to move beyond the one-off nature of most Twitter-based research and in the direction of systematic and rigorous comparative and transnational analysis. The TPD incorporates, in addition to data collected through Twitter’s streaming API and governmental websites, data from the Manifesto Project Database; the Electoral System Design Database; the ParlGov database; and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey. By compiling these different data sources it becomes possible to compare different countries, political parties, political party families, and different kinds of democracies. To illustrate the opportunities for comparative and transnational analysis that the TPD opens up, we ask: What are the differences between countries in parliamentarian Twitter interactions? How do political parties differ in their use of hashtags and what is their common ground? What is the structure of interaction between parliamentarians in the transnational debate? Alongside some interesting similarities, we find striking cross-party and particularly cross-national differences in how parliamentarians engage in politics on the social media platform.

Second-order effects or ideational rifts? Explaining outcomes of European elections in an era of populist politics

AbstractThis article seeks to enhance our understanding of the European Parliament (EP) elections in an era of populist and anti-European Union (EU) politics. Specifically, it aims to evaluate both the conventional second-order elections theory as well as an alternative approach that regards EP elections as an arena for conflict between liberal-democratic Europeanism and populist, extremist and euroskeptic alternatives. It does so by deriving a series of hypotheses from both approaches and testing these with party-level data from all EU member states in the context of 2019 EP elections. Our results challenge both explanations. Party size is a robust predictor of electoral performance in EP elections, and its effect is moderated by electoral system design. While large parties lost votes across the EU, their losses were more pronounced in countries where national legislatures are elected under plurality or mixed systems. We find no evidence of incumbent losses or electoral cycle effects. Party-level populism, extremism and euroskepticism did not systematically predict electoral performance but party ideology appears to have moderated the effects of incumbency and party size. Incumbency was associated with vote gain among populist and far-right parties but not other parties, and the effect of size also varied across party ideologies. In sum, these results suggest that vote fragmentation in the 2019 EP elections is partly explained by electoral system design, while it was not driven by the desire to punish political incumbents. Populist and far-right parties in power appear to be particularly immune to punishing behavior often associated with EP elections.

한국 선거제도 설계방향 : 슈거트(Shugart) 모형의 비판적 검토와 개혁방안

본 논문은 혼합형 선거제도(MMS)가 “당간차원 및 당내차원 효율성”을 증진시킨다는 슈거트의 주장을 비판적으로 검토하고, 혼합형 비례대표제(MMP)의 채택효과를 분석하고, MMP 도입을 위한 전제조건들을 제시하였다. 본 논문은 다음과 같은 주장을 하였다. 첫째, 단순다수제와 폐쇄형 명부 비례대표제를 조합하는 혼합형 선거제도는 지역구 의원과 비례대표 의원들의 행태를 평균화시키지 않는다. 둘째, MMP의 채택이 지역주의를 약화시키거나 의원들의 정책대변 동기를 증진시키는 효과는 크지 않은 반면, 상당한 수의 초과의석을 발생시킬 수 있다. 셋째, MMP의 채택은 정당민주화, 지역주의 경쟁구도 약화, 비례대표 의석 확대 및 MMP와 기존 정치제도와의 상호조응성을 전제로 한다. 본 논문은 선거제도 설계를 위한 규범적 준거틀로 정치의 시장거래화 방지 및 대리인 문제해결을 제시하고 이를 위한 개혁방안을 제안하였다.

The electoral implications of politically irrelevant cues under demanding electoral systems

AbstractCognitively demanding electoral systems increase the chance that voters make their choices based on politically irrelevant cues. To illustrate this argument, I analyze the effect of candidate name complexity—a visual cue that contains no politically meaningful information—in Japan, where voters need to write their preferred candidate's name on a blank ballot paper. I find that when electoral systems require voters to weigh a large number of candidates and simultaneously reduce the usefulness of partisan cues, candidates with more complex names tend to receive lower vote shares. By contrast, under less cognitively demanding systems, candidate name complexity has no effect on election outcomes. These findings have important implications for the debate on the “best” electoral system design.

Can the Design of Electoral Institutions Improve Perceptions of Democracy in Fragile States? Evidence from Afghanistan

AbstractLiberal peace-building efforts in fragile states often suffer from low levels of public support for democracy. This article explores whether changes in the design of electoral institutions improves perceptions of democracy in states seeking to transition from conflict to a democratic order. We do so by embedding a vignette experiment in a nationally representative survey of households in Afghanistan. Our experiment varies the method of selecting members to the national legislature, which allows us to examine how changes to status quo electoral institutions influence perceptions of democracy. We find that support for democracy depends on the choice of electoral institutions, particularly among those respondents who express sympathy for the Taliban insurgency. These results show how electoral system design improves citizen support for democracy and helps explain why democracy struggles to live up to its promise in these challenging contexts.

Mixed-member proportional electoral systems – the best of both worlds?

ABSTRACTMixed electoral systems are often associated with the hope of combining proportional election outcomes with a concentrated party system, and thus achieving the best of both worlds in electoral system design. It is especially the mixed-member proportional (MMP) variant that has retained a good reputation in this regard. Via a comparative analysis, we analyze whether or not the general praise for MMP systems is corroborated empirically. Our results show that the performance of MMP systems is heavily influenced by technical details, and elections conducted under MMP vary broadly with regard to possible proportionality–concentration combinations.

Improving access to voting with optimized matchings

Research on political representation has traditionally focused on the design of electoral systems. Yet there is evidence that voting costs result in lower turnout and undermine voters’ confidence in the electoral system. Election administrators can selectively manipulate participation costs for different individuals and groups, leading to biased electoral outcomes. Quantifying the costs of voting and designing fair, transparent and efficient rules for voter assignment to polling stations are important for theoretical and practical reasons. Using analytical models, we quantify the differential costs of participation faced by voters, which we measure in terms of distance to polling stations and wait times to cast a vote. To estimate the model parameters, we use real-world data on the 2013 midterm elections in Argentina. The assignment produced by our model cut average voting time by more than 27%, underscoring the inefficiencies of the current method of alphabetical assignment. Our strategy generates better estimates of the role of geographical and temporal conditions on electoral outcomes.

The conflict of partisan interests and normative expectations in electoral system change. Hungary in 2014

The expanding literature on electoral reform has proposed a comprehensive approach towards electoral system change arguing that going beyond the simple logic of maximising gains for the dominant political elite allows for assessing normative drivers behind the change (Hazan-Leyenaar, 2014). Indeed, electoral systems tend to fulfil normative expectations like providing fair representation and stable government. More nuanced, practical concerns such as making elections cheaper or more intelligible are also regarded as their assets. At the same time these normative goals are intermingled with the rule makers’ political interests. The delicate balance between normative goals and strategic partisan goals becomes highly visible at the moment of electoral system change. Academic literature is divided on the importance of the normative versus the partisan background of electoral systems change. Rational choice literature argues for the supremacy of partisan interests in the formation (transformation) of electoral system design (Benoit, 2004; Colomer, 2005), claiming that seat maximisation is the parties’ main interest. Others (Shugart, 2001) focus on normative claims: if the electoral system does not bring representative demands to the surface or prospective government formation remains unidentifiable for the voters in the electoral process or the mandate majority counters the voters’ election majority the electoral system is unbalanced and would require modification on this normative ground.

Male, Pale, and Stale? Diversity in Lawyers’ Leadership

Abstract When lawyers elect the leaders of their self-regulatory organizations, what sort of people do they vote for? How do the selection processes for elite lawyer sub-groups affect the diversity and efficacy of those groups? This article quantitatively assesses the demographic and professional diversity of leadership in the Law Society of Upper Canada. After many years of underrepresentation, in 2015 visible minority members and women were elected in numbers proportionate to their shares of Ontario lawyers. Regression analysis suggests that being non-white was not a disadvantage in the 2015 election, and being female actually conferred an advantage in attracting lawyers’ votes. The diverse employment contexts of the province’s lawyers were also represented in the elected group. However, early-career lawyers were completely unrepresented. This is largely a consequence of electoral system design choices, and can be remedied through the implementation of career-stage constituencies. The Law Society’s “benchers” are more demographically diverse than other elite lawyer sub-groups, such as judges, and the open and transparent selection process may be part of the reason.

Normative political theory, democratic politics and minority rights

In Equal Recognition, Alan Patten argues that in a proper relationship between normative political theory and democratic politics, we must make a clear distinction between two questions related to cultural rights: (a) authority (who should decide?) and (b) the substance of deliberation. The question he wants to explore, however, is not the authority question but the substantive question. The aim of this article is to show that an account of equal recognition cannot bracket out the democratic element. It argues, first, that Equal Recognition does not live up to its initial promise, as it contains a number of reflections and recommendations (on language rights, on secession, on the rights of migrants’ cultures) that either explicitly or implicitly include the democratic element. Second, it points at other important areas of political decision-making – such as electoral system design, districting, referendums, quotas – in which it is quite clear that in order to extend equal recognition to minority cultures, we are obliged to take decisions related to the design of democratic institutions.

Institutions as Causes and Effects: North African Electoral Systems During the Arab Spring

From late 2010 through 2011, popular uprisings toppled authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. In each country, a key component of the new regime's moment was the selection of rules for the first democratically elected assembly. This paper asks how the design of electoral systems affected the outcomes of the founding elections. We are interested in whether the rules of competition were consequential in determining winners and losers, and to the quality and trajectory of democratization. Our conclusions are based on analysis of district level results from the list proportional representation component of each election and on first person interviews with actors in who participated in the design of electoral rules.