Electoral Proportionality Research Articles

Evaluating special representation of non‐resident citizens: Eligibility, constituency and proportionality

AbstractSo far, 21 countries have introduced—and some thereafter withdrawn—reserved legislative seats for their citizens living abroad. Existing literature on this form of special representation has studied this topic either empirically or normatively. We bring these two approaches together based on the main dimensions of institutional variation of special representation: (1) eligibility, (2) constituency structure and (3) electoral proportionality. We first discuss each dimension from a normative perspective. In the second step, we map the range of empirical variation and highlight the most common arrangements. We conclude that the normative justification for special representation is generally weak, but some institutional configurations pose fewer problems. Specifically, we see fewer issues with special representation when electoral inclusion is limited to the first generation of emigrants and when it is used to limit the electoral influence of non‐resident populations that make up a large share of the overall electorate. By grounding our normative discussion on an empirical mapping, we bridge two disconnected literatures on special representation of non‐resident citizens.

한국 녹색당의 성장 조건에 관한 연구

The purpose of this study is to examine the emergence and development of green parties around the world to identify general conditions for their growth and to see if the findings can be applied to the Korean Green Party. In doing so, it explores the requirements of a political party based on the experience of the Korean Green Party.
 The empirical analysis shows that in terms of political opportunity structure, green parties around the world grow into parties that influence the political system when elections are highly proportional and the proportional representation rate is above 40%. However, in the case of the Korean Green Party, the limitations of the quasi-connected proportional representation system with a ‘cap’ clause and the emergence of satellite parties in the 2020 general election resulted in lower electoral proportionality than before, and the proportional representation rate was only 15.67%, which did not have favorable conditions for growth.
 Next, in terms of party leadership, global green parties have observed that green parties grow when they maintain intra-party unity and pursue coalition politics in elections. However, the Korean Green Party failed to create a growth engine during the 2020 general election, as it failed to maintain intra-party unity and pursue coalition politics.
 Based on this analysis, in order for the Korean Green Party to grow in the future, the party leadership should focus its efforts on introducing a more proportional electoral system and expanding the number of seats for proportional representation, while maintaining intra-party unity and pursuing coalition politics.

Electoral proportionality vs. party system concentration. The 2020 Romanian local election

Electoral proportionality vs. party system concentration. The 2020 Romanian local election

Electoral proportionality vs. party system concentration. The 2020 Romanian local election

Electoral proportionality vs. party system concentration. The 2020 Romanian local election

DEGOLIZAM, FRANCUSKA V REPUBLIKA I SRPSKA USTAVNA REŠENJA

Can the political and doctrinal legacy of Charles De Gaulle be linked to Serbia? The answer is affirmative even far more than we think. Austrian and French experiences were used during the drafting of the Serbian constitution from 2006. Our constitutional text also established a kind of mixed system, in which the Prime Minister was the holder of executive power, while the President of the Republic was in charge of expressing the unity of the Republic of Serbia. It was a bad copy of the constitution of the French V Republic. The President of the Republic of Serbia was elected by the people in direct elections, but he was denied the competencies that this election requires. Even more serious consequences were left by the introduction of a proportional electoral system that produced weak and corrupt coalition governments whose composition was determined by reach poeple and foreign intelligence services. In order to avoid distortions of the electoral proportionality, ie to obtain a stable government, the introduction of autocratic measures of media supervision and control and state institutions followed.

The Effects of Government System Fractionalization on Satisfaction With Democracy

Consensual-pluralistic institutional features of representative democracies have traditionally been associated with satisfaction with democracy (SWD). However, more recent studies report contradictory results on the effects of some of these institutional determinants on SWD. This article confirms these puzzling findings by showing that electoral proportionality increases SWD while other pluralistic factors such as government fractionalization produce the opposite effect. We illustrate this duality of counteracting effects by expanding the number of cases under study to different regions of the world in a comprehensive time-series cross-sectional sample of 58 democracies between 1990 and 2012. In the second part of the paper, we are able to reconfirm these findings at the individual level by employing survey data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems.

Representative systems and policy punctuations

ABSTRACTThis article examines how the characteristics of political institutions impact the extensiveness of budget punctuations. We develop a theory based on an adaptive systems framework from policy process studies of budgeting, and posit that institutional factors that impede democratic responsiveness lead to inefficiencies that cause policy changes to become more punctuated. Based on previous research on policy responsiveness, we hypothesize that national budgets become more punctuated with increases in federalism, electoral proportionality and executive dominance. We test our theory using Eurostat and International Monetary Fund (COFOG) budget data from 24 countries over the period 1996–2011. Our results strongly support the proposition that more federalized systems produce more budget punctuations, but provide only weak support for the propositions that proportional systems and those with dominant executives do so. The general proposition that institutions can impede the efficient processing of information receives some support, and warrants further investigation.

Electoral proportionality, multi-party cabinets and policy responsiveness

This research note recasts the relationship between electoral proportionality and government responsiveness to public needs, and emphasizes the limits of studies that look at the ideological congruence between cabinets and voters as the dependent variable, and assume that this congruence translates into policy responsiveness. The translation of public will into policy is contingent on many other system characteristics, some of which are by-products of electoral rules. This note focuses on the effect of party fragmentation on the way cabinets adjust their spending behaviour to ideological shifts within the populace. Party fragmentation is a negative externality of proportional representation, with the potential to neutralize/overturn its positive effects on representation. Building on the “wars of attrition” literature I show that multi-party cabinets have a difficult time reducing spending when the public wants it, which decreases the overall responsiveness of government to ideological shifts. The empirical tests using spending data in 17 Western democracies between 1962 and 1991 support these claims.

Proportionality and Turnout

Many studies find that voter turnout is higher in proportional representation (PR) elections than in plurality elections, but because the two systems differ in multiple ways and are used in different contexts it is difficult to know precisely why. I focus on municipal elections in France, where cities above a certain population threshold are required to use a PR system while those below use a type of plurality rule; this setting allows me to compare political outcomes across electoral systems while holding fixed a large set of social and political features. I find that the PR system noticeably increases turnout compared with plurality. I provide evidence suggesting that it does so in part by encouraging turnout in lopsided races and in part by inducing entry of new candidates. The findings highlight the importance of electoral proportionality in explaining cross-national differences in voter turnout.

Do electoral institutions have an impact on population health?

There is an emerging political economics literature which purports to show that legislatures elected based on proportional electoral rules spend more and redistribute more than legislatures elected based on majoritarian electoral rules. Going a step further the authors of this paper consider whether degree of electoral proportionality has an impact on population health and, in particular, the health of the least advantaged members of society. A panel of 24 parliamentary democracies for the years 1960–2004 is used to examine the relationship between electoral institutions and health. The authors find that greater electoral proportionality is positively associated with overall population health (as indicated by life expectancy) and with the health of the poorest (as indicated by a reduction in infant mortality). A panel of 17 countries for the years 1970–2004 is then used to show to that electoral permissiveness modifies the impact of health spending on infant mortality.

The Origins and Strengths of Regional Parties

Traditional explanations of the origins of regional parties as the products of regionally-based social cleavages cannot fully account for the variation in regional party strength both within and across countries. This unexplained variance can be explained, however, by looking at institutions, and in particular, political decentralization. This argument is tested with a statistical analysis of thirty-seven democracies around the world from 1945 to 2002. The analysis shows that political decentralization increases the strength of regional parties in national legislatures, independent of the strength of regional cleavages, as well as of various features of a country's political system, such as fiscal decentralization, presidentialism, electoral proportionality, cross-regional voting laws and the sequencing of executive and legislative elections.

Social Policy at the 2004 Election

Social policy appeared to be a key battleground at the 2004 Australian Federal election. Opposition Leader Latham announced major policies on Medicare, family support and taxation, and schools funding during the election campaign. Using sample survey data from the Australian Election Study 2004, this paper analyses how these policies may have influenced voters. In brief, although a significant proportion of electors identified these issues as being extremely important to them when they were deciding about how to vote, many made up their mind about how to vote around the time of the announcement of the election or before. This mitigated the potential effect that these major policies could have on the election outcome.Nevertheless, these policies were important and Labor had a significant policy advantage amongst those who were late deciders about how to cast their vote.

Teorie reálné kvóty, alternativní přístup k měření volební proporcionality

Teorie reálné kvóty, alternativní přístup k měření volební proporcionality

Selecting Indexes of Electoral Proportionality: General Properties and Relationships

Measuring the proportionality of outcomes in termsof each party's vote and seatshares is an important task in electoral analysis.Various indexes have been designedthat provide a summary statistic of electoralproportionality/disproportionality. Claimsand counter-claims have been made regarding thestrengths and weaknesses of particularindexes. Important consequences follow from thismethodological pluralism. First, it isnot always clear which index has been employedwhen particular electoral outcomesare discussed. Second, recent additions to thelist of indexes have not been thoroughlyscrutinised and appraised. Third, the lack ofknowledge about the general relationshipbetween indexes means that observations might bedifferent had a different index beenused. This article seeks to identify and clarifythe particular properties of different indexesof proportionality. Relatively new, and largelyuntested, indexes of proportionality areexamined and some unusual and potentially damagingproperties are identified. We alsocompare different measures of disproportionality inan effort to specify some generalproperties of the inter-relationships between them.Understanding the particular patternsof electoral competition and vote distributionsthat affect the relationship between thesemeasures should enable users to anticipate theconsequences of preferring one index overothers.

The Proportionality of Electoral Systems: Electoral Welfare and Electoral Inequality

This paper argues that measuring the degree of proportionality in an electoral system is equivalent to measuring the degree of electoral inequality, defined in terms of inter‐party differences in the seats‐to‐votes ratio. It proposes an index of the degree of electoral inequality which is based on Atkinson’s (1970) index, applied originally to measuring income inequality. This index satisfies all the criteria proposed in the literature for evaluating measures of electoral proportionality. In addition, such an Atkinson‐type index of electoral inequality can also be given a welfarist interpretation by directly relating its value to the level of electoral welfare. Under such an interpretation, the disproportionality in an electoral system may be interpreted as being the result of the system imputing voting shares to the different political parties which are different from their actual voting shares. The larger this difference, the greater the degree of disproportionality in the system. The use of this index is illustrated by an application to the outcomes of Irish General Elections from 1923 till 1997.

Conditions Favouring Parties of the Extreme Right in Western Europe

We examine the systemic conditions that have influenced the electoral success of parties of the extreme right in West European politics from 1970 through 1990. Empirical estimates based on 103 elections in sixteen countries suggest that electoral and party-system factors interact with each other to generate conditions conducive to these parties. Specifically, increasing electoral thresholds dampen support for the extreme right as the number of parliamentary parties expands. At the same time, multi-partism increasingly fosters parties of the extreme right with rising electoral proportionality. Our analyses also indicate that higher rates of unemployment provide a favourable environment for these political movements. These results suggest that levels of electoral support for the extreme right are sensitive to factors that can be modified through policy instruments.

Exploring uniformity and variability in local electoral outcomes: Some evidence from English local elections 1985–1991

A detailed analysis of English local elections between 1985 and 1991 seems to support the propositions that a proportion of electors hold contradictory local and national voting preferences at one and the same time; and that there is significant variation in party performance both between and within local authorities. The paper concludes that the stimuli to which electors respond in local elections are often those most relevant to the ‘context’ in which their vote is cast. If partisan dealignment has led to a greater willingness on the part of the electorate to regard voting as a matter of ‘horses for courses’, there may not only be a further fragmentation in the results of elections of all kinds but the parties may experience different degrees of success depending on the nature of the contest.

The Irish electorate, 1868–1915

Between 1801 and 1921 Ireland in common with the rest of the British Isles was represented in the house of commons at Westminster. During this time the basis of the Irish representation underwent considerable change both in relation to the number of Irish M.P.s, electors and population and in comparison with the number of M.P.s, electors and population for Great Britain. The purpose of this article ir, by means of statistical tables, to analyse the Irish electorate between 1868 and 1915 and in particular to show the effect of the electoral reforms of 1868 and 1884–5. The electorate of Ireland will be viewed not only in the context of the separate Irish constituencies and the proportion of electors to adult males and population in each but also in the context of the whole of the British Isles and the total number of electors and population with the proportion of electors to population in each country. As well the average number of electors and population per M.P. for the different countries will be shown.

Turnout and Marginality in Local Elections

A certain amount of evidence has accumulated in the past few years to show that local election turnout is high in marginal wards. A number of different sources make the point, but the most complete evidence is presented in a recent issue of Political Studies by Fletcher who summarizes the prevailing view when he writes that ‘there was a very strong inverse correlation between the size of the majority in a contest and turnout. The smaller the margin between the victorious candidate and his closest opponent, the higher the proportion of electors voting was likely to have been.’ In an earlier report it was suggested that the closeness of party conflict is the overwhelming influence on turnout. Only three writers fail to discover a high poll in marginal wards.