Electoral Rules Research Articles

Penyuluhan Hukum sebagai Upaya Membentuk Kecerdasan Pemilih Pemula pada Pemilu 2024

General elections (elections) have an important meaning in the implementation of democracy. Elections are a means of implementing people's sovereignty. Therefore, it is hoped that the election will be democratic and participated in by all members of the community who have met the requirements. One group of people who need serious attention is the group of first-time voters. Beginner voters as participants who have never participated in an election before are expected to participate in the 2024 election intelligently. This means that beginner voters are expected to understand election rules, get to know election participants, know about voting mechanisms, and matters related to hoaxes and money politics. Good understanding and adequate knowledge can make beginner voters to participate in elections well, avoid election violations, and can choose candidates based on good criteria. This situation and condition are also experienced by students at Wonda Restoration Vocational School. There are 82 Restoration Vocational School students in the category of beginner voters who need to broaden their horizons and knowledge about elections. Various election regulations and their changes need to be studied and explored through legal education activities. Through socialization about election law, it is hoped that students can become intelligent voters during the elections at 2024.

Five major themes in legislative committees' research between 2010 and 2023: A review

AbstractLegislative committees have recently received inadequate attention in the available interjurisdictional literature. This article in the 2024 Policy Studies Yearbook, published by Politics & Policy, reviews legislative committee data categories, methods, and the distribution of authorship to explore how legislative committee research has fared between 2010 and 2023. This review article establishes that since 2010, research on committee structure has been dominated by U.S. congressional theories and how to test them in noncongressional settings. The dominant aspect of legislative organization across the five reviewed themes is the selection of committee members, an essential aspect of understanding power dynamics in modern legislatures. As survey methods and case studies have increased, the archival analysis methods have decreased, indicating an increasing turn to first‐hand primary data in analyzing the internal organization of committees. There is also a growing trend toward greater collaboration among scholars.Related ArticlesJeong, Gyung‐Ho. 2016. “Electoral Rules and Bureaucratic Effectiveness.” Politics & Policy 44(6): 1089–115. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12184.Jones, Kate, and Kerry, Jacobs. 2009. “Public Accounts Committees, New Public Management, and Institutionalism: A Case Study.” Politics & Policy 39(5): 1023–46. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2009.00209.x/abstract.Pelizzo, Riccardo and Abel Kinyondo. 2014. “Public Accounts Committees in Eastern and Southern Africa: A Comparative Analysis.” Politics & Policy 42(1), 77–102. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12062.

Why Do Non‐Resident Citizens Get Elected? Candidates' Electoral Success in Ecuadorian Extraterritorial Districts

To the growing literature on non-resident citizens’ special representation, we contribute with a systematic examination of the role of descriptive representation of citizens living abroad in elections for extraterritorial districts. Using data for the 308 candidacy observations in three two-seat extraterritorial districts in five legislative elections held between 2007 and 2021 in Ecuador, for a total of 30 seats, we test four hypotheses related to the electoral rules, party-level, and socio-demographic factors of non-resident candidates. Ecuadorian non-resident candidates benefit from their incumbency position and party affiliation, along with left-wing ideological ascription and belonging to party organizations that pushed for voting rights abroad and that manifest an interest in emigrant issues. This article contributes to showing what gets emigrants elected in extraterritorial seats and offers a within-country comparison connecting elections with legislative politics across national borders.

Denigrating democracy: How electoral competition fuels xenophobia in Lebanon

When do electoral incentives encourage candidates to target immigrants with discriminatory rhetoric? I address this question through a novel dataset of refugee-related tweets by elites in Lebanon, the country hosting the most Syrian refugees per capita globally. I find that Lebanon’s 2018 election, the first under a new set of electoral rules, precipitated an increase in anti-migrant tweets. However, the electoral campaign did not affect candidates’ rhetoric uniformly, but rather fueled xenophobic discourses specifically among Christian candidates, whose voter base is particularly hostile towards refugees, and especially among Christians facing the fiercest electoral competition. This paper makes three contributions: theoretically, it elucidates the consequences of partisan competition for xenophobia; conceptually, it relaxes an assumption common in the ethnic institutions literature that ethnic composition is fixed over time; and empirically, it demonstrates how social media data can be harnessed for expanding a nascent literature on migration politics in the Global South.

Quickie Election Rules in Effect

The General Counsel for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) recently issued a memorandum outlining the details of the labor board's new “quickie election” rules, NLRB Memorandum GC 24‐02, Guidance Memorandum on 2023 Updated Representation Case Procedures (December 8, 2023). Employers who had failed to appreciate the need for pre‐petition union avoidance strategies now have more reason to appreciate their value.

How Election Rules Affect Who Wins

Abstract Contemporary election reforms that are purported to increase or decrease turnout tend to have negligible effects on election outcomes. We offer an analytical framework to explain why. Contrary to heated political rhetoric, election policies have small effects on outcomes because they tend to target small shares of the electorate, have a small effect on turnout, and/or affect voters who are relatively balanced in their partisanship. After developing this framework, we address how the findings bear on minority voting rights. We then show that countermobilization from political parties cannot explain the small effects of election laws. We explain that even when a state passes multiple policies at the same time, the reforms will still only have a marginal effect on turnout and an ambiguous effect on who wins. Finally, we explain what policies should raise alarm about affecting outcomes.

How proportional are electoral systems? A universal measure of electoral rules

The proportionality principle of electoral systems plays an important role in multiple literatures, including comparative politics, political economy, and conflict studies. The single most important electoral system feature used to determine whether an electoral system might provide for proportional outcomes is district magnitude, i.e., the number of representatives that are elected from a given district. However, once we move beyond “simple” systems, measuring the institutional side of the equation becomes more complex. The legislative electoral systems of three out of five (61%) contemporary democracies rely on multiple institutional rules that affect the proportionality of their seat allocation, for example by combining different district magnitudes in multiple tiers, or delimiting the number of parties that can win seats through legal thresholds. There is no widely accepted measure of district magnitude for such cases. Relying on four simple axioms, this article extends the concept of district magnitude to all these complex electoral systems. We introduce the effective district magnitude, a new index that measures the proportionality of electoral systems based solely on institutional rules. It is applicable for all rules used in national parliamentary elections in democracies worldwide. This new, theory-based index improves the explanatory power of two crucial variables usually associated with district magnitude: vote-seat disproportionality and party system fragmentation.

Differentiating the sources of post‐election partisan affect warming

AbstractWhile scholars have closely examined the intensification of negative affect across party lines during elections, less is known about the decline of partisan hostility in the aftermath of election campaigns. Synthesizing insights from research on electoral rules and political psychology, we theorize and empirically test two such mechanisms of post‐election negative affect decline. The first is that of winners' generosity: the expectation that self‐perceived election winners will express warmer feelings towards political opponents. The second is that of co‐governance, which predicts that shared coalition status leads to warmer affective evaluations among governing parties. We provide evidence that these mechanisms operate as pressure valves of negative partisan affect. We also show that while co‐governance reduces negative affect between parties who govern together, it fuels negative affect among supporters of opposition parties. The empirical analyses leverage a uniquely uncertain political period following the 2021 Israeli elections, around which we conducted an original panel study. Our findings advance the comparative polarization literature and connect psychological and institutional accounts of temporal fluctuations in partisan affect.

Who Runs for Higher Office? Electoral Institutions and Level‐Hopping Attempts in Germany's State Legislatures

Do electoral institutions matter for subnational legislators’ career choices in a multi‐level polity? The paper considers this question by analyzing candidacies of sitting German State MPs for the Federal parliament (“level‐hopping attempts”), leveraging cross‐ and within‐legislature variation in electoral rules (due to the widespread adoption of mixed‐member systems in Germany's subnational parliaments). State MPs elected via list PR can be expected to be more likely to attempt level‐hopping than those elected in the single‐member districts (SMD) tier, as the former face lower re‐election rates and the latter are more directly accountable to their constituency's voters. Empirical evidence from a novel dataset of over 8000 State legislators spanning 10 Federal elections (1987–2021) confirms this hypothesis. It is also shown that the difference in behavior across tiers is more marked when State MPs run for insecure Federal candidacies than when they are offered secure candidacies. The findings suggest that subnational electoral institutions play a role in enabling or constraining legislators' progressive ambition. Moreover, they highlight a previously overlooked dimension of the “mandate divide” between MPs belonging to different electoral tiers of mixed‐member systems.

Assessing Congressional Institutionalization and Political Elites’ Renewal in Latin America Through Legislative Amateurism

Legislative experience, one of the various indicators of both congressional institutionalization and political elites’ renewal, has been mostly measured by either turnover or reelection. However, in regions such as Latin America, with more volatile and less institutionalized party systems, where most careers are not stable and ambitions are not mostly static, turnover and reelection may not be accurate measures of legislative experience. This paper aims to fill this gap by assessing parliamentary experience in Latin America by means of a more accurate indicator: legislative amateurism. Using a novel dataset comprising eighteen national single or lower-chamber legislatures over almost three decades, we find that legislative amateurism is a consequence of party system institutionalization, electoral volatility, and newly implemented gender quotas. Overall, our findings suggest that weak political parties and certain electoral rules may become fertile ground for amateur legislatorś landing in Congress.

Electoral Legitimacy and Gender Representation Barriers; Theories and Practices in Nigeria

The article describes relevant concepts and theories on Gender Representation and Electoral Legitimacy behaviours and barriers that obstruct global policies for gender equity model to a free and fair election. The limiting barriers and theories described, include Class-Conflict versus Representation Theory, Gender vs Culture, Electoral Legitimacy Deficit vs Dominance Theory, Machismo Culture, Institutional concept, Human Capital, Feminist Rights Concepts (FGF) and the UN Think, Assess, Consider, and Take Action (UNTACT) Concept. The article adopts a descriptive secondary qualitative method to gather data on the key theories, barriers and practices affecting gender representation electoral. Data collection include previous studies, articles, reports, publications, and Electoral Commission official documents already generated. These various sources of information gathered, was critically examined, reviewed, analysed, and synthesized to understand the context in which gender representation barriers exist. Research results indicted Nigeria Electoral process as extremely unreliable at the output-delivery process, and thus, criticised for having flaws and failing to completely enforce candidate electoral rules, which impacts female representation. However, the research contributed to a deeper understanding of the complexities surrounding electoral theories, practices and their impact on electoral system’s legitimacy. Findings suggest, importance of challenging patriarchal electioneering structures, cultural norms, and power imbalances in the political sphere and the need for power dynamics to be examined critically, to deliver effective gender or female representation. Keywords: Electoral Legitimacy, Gender Representation, Theories, Barriers, Nigeria.

When do elections help autocrats? The plight of Palestinians under SNTV in Jordan

Autocrats are often accused of manipulating electoral rules to favour pro-regime groups at the expense of the opposition. They select electoral systems, gerrymander districts, and engage in electoral fraud to ensure that elections do not challenge their rule. We investigate the extent to which incumbent rulers engage in such tactics by focusing on the case of Jordan. In particular we examine whether the Jordanian regime has ‘tweaked’ the single non-transferable vote system (SNTV) so that it systematically favours ethnic Jordanian tribes of nomadic descent, who form the bedrock of support for the monarchy and against ethnic Palestinian tribes, who are more supportive of opposition parties. SNTV is also notorious for causing coordination problems for parties – or tribes in this case – that offer candidates. Using data from municipal elections, we find that the regime does indeed advantage nomadic residents. Municipalities with a significant presence of these residents were assigned a greater number of council seats per unit of population and lower district magnitudes, facilitating electoral coordination. Nomadic tribes also performed better with regard to voter coordination but not in nominating the optimal number of candidates. eOur findings demonstrate that clean elections in authoritarian countries if done “right” can perpetuate and bolster regime favourites while simultaneously disenfranchising their challengers.

Suffrage and the Secret Ballot in Eighteenth-Century London Parishes

AbstractThis article argues that pre-nineteenth-century elections at a sub-national level have an important place in the history of ‘modern’ voting practices. It does this through a discussion of unusually well-documented election disputes in eighteenth-century London parishes. Previously neglected records of litigation in the ecclesiastical courts reveal that parish elections in this period generated arguments which did not take place at a parliamentary level until the following century: arguments over votes for women, votes for religious minorities, and the secret ballot. Customary electoral rules came under increasing pressure in the early eighteenth century as London’s population grew and changed in character. In some parishes, this produced a narrowing of the traditional ratepayer franchise, allowing only male Anglican ratepayers a vote in parish elections. Elsewhere, groups or individual residents successfully pushed for a more inclusive franchise which allowed ratepaying women, Dissenters, and Jews a voice in parochial politics. Similarly mixed practices emerged with regard to electoral procedure: residents who feared the overbearing influence of their neighbours pressed for a secret ballot, while others insisted on the merits of an open poll. These cases illustrate the importance of small-scale local institutions as key sites of innovation in the history of electoral reform.

Electoral rule and public sector efficiency: Some evidence from Italian municipalities

AbstractWe study the effect of Law 81/1993, which introduced a different rule for the election of mayors, on the technical efficiency of Italian cities over the period 1998–2006. Since 1993, municipalities below 15,000 inhabitants vote with a single‐ballot system, whereas cities above 15,000 inhabitants are subject to a double ballot. We first estimate the output‐oriented technical efficiency of municipalities through data envelopment analysis, and then we perform a regression discontinuity design analysis by exploiting the exogenous change in the electoral scheme at the 15,000 inhabitants cut‐off. We find evidence that municipalities voting under a double‐ballot rule show lower levels of efficiency—in terms of provision of public goods—compared with cities voting under a single‐ballot scheme, by about 6.5%. This effect is driven by inefficiencies registered in specific sectors, that is, police, education, and maintenance of roads. Furthermore, the overall lower efficiency of municipalities voting under runoff is related to the different level of educational attainment of elected mayors, whereas it is not driven by the features of Law 81/1993 relating to the number of lists forming a coalition in support of mayoral candidates and to disjoint votes.

How ballot access laws increase primary competition and decrease party unity

How do electoral institutions affect primary competition and legislative behavior? This paper examines the understudied electoral rule known as ballot access laws, advancing the novel theory that denying ballot access to minor candidates forces these outsiders into major parties. I find that in American states that adopt high ballot access thresholds experience higher rates of ideological heterogeneity and primary competition, and those that reduce their thresholds experience a reduction in heterogeneity and competition. Using an original dataset on state-level changes to ballot access thresholds from 1990 to 2018, I find that an increase in the number and type of primary competition leads to an increase in heterogeneity within both party caucuses. This paper adds to the literature on legislative behavior and electoral institutions, demonstrating institutions role in shaping electoral competition and the ideology of those represented in office.

Reluctant cooptation: The legislative recruitment of the private sector into Russia’s dominant party, 2015–2020

Cooptation is one of the most efficient strategies employed by authoritarian regimes and their leaders in order to survive in power. In most of these regimes, dominant pro-government parties serve as important tools of cooptation in general and of legislative recruitment, as one of its forms, in particular. The main thesis of this study is that cooptation is selective. When contrasted to the social sectors that are directly linked to the state, the private sector will be at a relative disadvantage, resulting in a smaller scope of cooptation. To test this thesis empirically, we build several hypotheses based on our expectations regarding the effects of electoral rules on candidate selection, and then test these hypotheses against the data from 82 regional legislative elections held in Russia in 2015–2020. The analysis confirms our main thesis and clarifies several findings previously reported in the literature on business and politics in Russia.

The party system effects of unstable electoral rules in Latin America

Prior studies have shown that electoral rules fail to determine the number of parties in new democracies due to the uncertainty of voters and politicians about which parties are viable. Latin American democracies, where electoral volatility has generally remained high and party institutionalization low, have been a primary example of this phenomenon. We argue that even in shifting political environments the fragmentation of the party system is likely to become consistent with the permissiveness of electoral rules and the level of social diversity as voters and party leaders accumulate experience with elections and the rate of electoral regime change declines. We find support for these propositions analyzing an original dataset on Latin American democratic elections. This article contributes to research on electoral systems and political parties by identifying the conditions under which equilibrium electoral outcomes can be expected after a transition to democracy in unstable institutional settings.

Union Election Rules Eased

Union Election Rules Eased

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.

The Role of Regional Bawaslu as a Supervisor in the Prevention and Hndling of Election Administration Violations in the City of Sukabumi

Background. General elections are held simultaneously, including the election of members of the House of Representatives, members of the Regional Representative Council, President and Vice President, and to elect members of the Regional People's Representative Council, where in each process towards general elections there are several stages that need to be carried out by election participants. Purpose. In the general election stages, there are often negligence committed by election participants, one of which is election administration violations, election administration violations are violations committed by election participants or election organizers during the election stages. Method. In this research, the author uses normative juridical research methods that are qualitative in nature. Results. Based on the findings made by the Sukabumi City Bawaslu, there were 19 findings of administrative violations in Sukabumi City committed by 2019 election participants, including 16 violations of campaign props and 3 violations of campaigns without notification letters to the police. From the findings by the Sukabumi City Bawaslu related to administrative violations, the Sukabumi City Bawaslu is authorized to receive, examine, review, decide reports from the public or findings by the Election Supervisor related to alleged election administration violations. From the alleged violation of election administration, the settlement uses a fast event in accordance with Article 40 of Perbawaslu No. 8 of 2022. From the many findings of alleged election administration violations, Bawaslu of Sukabumi City made several prevention efforts including appeals, Bawaslu of Sukabumi City delivered appeals to the community, election officials, and election officials. Conclusion. Socialization, namely the implementation of the initialization of election rules and regulations and coordination to the community, election participants, and local government agencies, as well as law enforcement agencies conducting cooperation with coordination with law enforcement agencies related to elections.