List Proportional Representation Research Articles

The Contagion of Women Candidates in Single-Member District and Proportional Representation Electoral Systems: Canada and Norway

There is a distinct gap in women's representation in national legislatures between countries with single-member district electoral systems and those with proportional representation electoral systems. While this gap has been well documented, there have been only limited attempts at explaining its existence. After reviewing the literature on the representation gap, we turn to the party change literature and propose a modified contagion theory as one possible explanation for the gap. Contagion theory suggests that traditional parties will feel pressured to nominate more women if one of their political rivals, usually a smaller party farther to the left, starts to promote representation of women. We distinguish between macrocontagion and microcontagion and argue that especially microcontagion is more likely to occur in party list proportional representation systems than in single-member district systems. This should be true because contagion pressures are more likely to develop, and the costs of adapting to ...

Fujimori's 1990 Upset Victory in Peru: Electoral Rules, Contingencies, and Adaptive Strategies

The very sudden rise of Alberto Fujimori to the presidency of Peru is unprecedented. At the beginning of March 1990 Fujimori was one of five minor candidates who together claimed no more than one percent of voter preferences in public opinion polls. Yet less than six weeks later in the April 8 general election he almost matched the vote for Mario Vargas Llosa, the internationally acclaimed novelist and overwhelming favorite, whose slick, American-style campaign had spent twenty times more on media advertising. Fujimori immediately became the favorite for the runoff election, which he won by a landslide on June 10. How could the son of Japanese immigrants, who speaks Spanish with a noticeable accent, rise fronm political obscurity to become the frontrunner in a matter of weeks and president-elect in several months? Observers of Peruvian politics have linked Fujimori's tsunami, or electoral tidal wave, to the decline of the country's party system in the 1980s and to Vargas Llosa's inability to appeal to the median voter. Most analysts agree that the novelist's candidacy was undermined by his alliance with the established conservative parties, his candid and often strident advocacy of neoliberal economic policies, and the general perception that he represented Peru's mostly white, westernized elite. In contrast, Fujimori, who was perceived to be a political independent, spoke in broad generalities and skilfully positioned himself in the center of the political spectrum. Fujimori's personal characteristics, including his Asian ethnicity, also appealed to voters who longed for a clean break with the past. This article does not refute the basic tenets of this conventional wisdom, but it maintains that they became compelling only when Fujimori managed, against formidable odds, to reach the threshold of viable candidacy at the very end of the general election campaign. The chief concern here is not the relatively easy question why Fujimori won the runoff election over Vargas Llosa, but the more difficult one how he made it into the runoff in the first place. Although there is no simple answer to this question, this article argues that electoral rules--especially the majority runoff format used in the presidential contest, high district magnitude and open list proportional representation (PR) employed in congressional elections, and a constitutional provision allowing simultaneous candidacies for the presidency

In the absence of vote pooling: Nomination and vote allocation errors in Colombia

Electoral systems vary in the degree to which candidates and parties may pool their votes to maximize seats won. The Japanese single nontransferable vote (SNTV) system allows no vote pooling. Hence parties may commit errors in nomination and vote allocation. List proportional representation (PR) also may limit the amount of vote pooling among lists. If a party is internally fragmented, as in Colombia, list PR may even resemble SNTV. Thus we can compare Colombian error rates to Japanese. The Colombian Liberal Party is less error-prone than the country-specific literature implies; however, the Colombian case suggests that an absence of vote pooling can be costly to parties even under PR systems.

Electoral system choice in South Africa: Implications for intergroup moderation

The article assesses the adoption of a proportional representation electoral system for South Africa's first post‐apartheid election, held 26–28 April 1994. The performance of the electoral system chosen for this election ‐ a form of party list proportional representation with regional and national features ‐ is argued to be an important, if not critical, element of building successful democratic post‐apartheid political institutions in this deeply divided society. The article analyses the potential conflict‐mitigating effects of electoral system choice in South Africa, particularly the question of whether or not the electoral system contained incentives for moderation by office‐seekers across ethnic and racial cleavages during the 1994 election campaign, thereby promoting intergroup co‐operation and reconciliation.

A Game Theoretic Model of Reform in Latin American Democracies

In this article I develop a simple game-theoretic model of administrative reform in Latin American democracies. The model, which is based on the incentives facing the politicians who must initiate reforms if any are to occur, yields two predictions: (1) reforms are more likely to pass the legislative hurdle when patronage is evenly distributed among the strongest parties, and (2) initial reforms are more likely to be followed by further extensions of reform where the electoral weight of the top parties remains relatively even and stable. Attention to the incentives facing legislators and party leaders also results in the expectation that certain political institutions, such as open list proportional representation and electoral rules that minimize party control over candidate lists, reduce the probability of reform. I test these predictions and expectations on a set of Latin American democracies and find them consistent with historical events.

Reformulating the Cube Law for Proportional Representation Elections

The cube law was proposed around 1910 to express the conversion of a party's vote shares into its seat share in two-party plurality elections with single-seat districts. This article develops predictive seat-vote equations for a much wider range of elections, including those involving many parties, single- and multi-seat districts, and diverse seat allocation rules such as plurality and list proportional representation (PR). Without any statistical curve fitting based on the seat and vote shares themselves, the basic features of the conversion are predicted using exogenous parameters: magnitude and number of districts, number of parties, and total size of the electorate and of the assembly. The link between the proposed equations and the original cube law is explicated. Using an existing data base, the fit of the predictive model is examined. On balance, this model accounts well for the conversion of votes to seats, and for the deviation from proportionality in PR systems.

THRESHOLDS AND PAYOFFS IN LIST SYSTEMS OF PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION *

ABSTRACTBuilding on to the earlier work by Stein Rokkan and by Douglas Rae, Victor Hanby, and John Loosemore on the relationship of parties' vote shares and seat shares at the district level in list proportional representation (P.R.) systems, we propose sets of formulas for (1) the thresholds of representation and exclusion that a party has to cross to win its first seat, and (2) the minimum and maximum proportions of the vote required to obtain a given number of seats. The electoral systems on which we focus our analysis are the main variants of list P.R. that have been used in practice: the d'Hondt, modified Saint‐Laguë, and largest remainder systems. The thresholds of representation and the minimum vote shares tend to show greater differences among systems than the thresholds of exclusion and the maximum vote shares. These differences, however, may be outweighed by two other factors: the number of seats in a district, and the number of parties presenting lists.