Majoritarian Electoral Systems Research Articles

The Impact of Proportional Representation on Government Effectiveness: The New Zealand Experience

It is often claimed that proportional representation (PR) undermines government effectiveness, including decisional efficacy, fiscal prudence, electoral responsiveness and accountability. Drawing on New Zealand's experience since the introduction of a mixed‐member proportional (MMP) electoral system in 1996, this article examines the impact of the new voting system on government effectiveness. Although government durability has been substantially reduced and the policy‐making process has become more complex, governments under MMP appear to be no less able to address major policy problems or respond to changing economic circumstances. Moreover, New Zealand has maintained continuous fiscal surpluses under MMP — a radical departure from the protracted, and often large, deficits that characterised the previous two decades under a majoritarian electoral system.

Party Systems and Democratization: A Comparative Study of the Third Word

This study examines the development of democracy in the Third World in the 1990s. All Third World countries that had at least one competitive election in the 1990s are included. The development of democracy is the dependent variable: did the countries mature into liberal democracy, remain electoral democracies or relapse into authoritarianism? The independent variables measure three dimensions of party systems: fragmentation, one-party dominance, and stability. Presidentialism/parliamentarism and majoritarianism/proportionalism are controlled for as intervening variables. Overall, the results indicate that party system characteristics are of limited explanatory value. However, in certain contexts they seem to play a role. In countries with majoritarian electoral systems, both one-party dominance and a high degree of party system fragmentation are detrimental to the development of democracy. In parliamentary systems, there is a negative association between the development of democracy and the degree of party system fragmentation.

Majoritarian Electoral Systems and Consumer Power: Price-Level Evidence from the OECD Countries

A straightforward extension of the standard Stigler-Peltzman model of regulation, coupled with a Taagepera- Shugart analysis of electoral-system effects, suggests: (a) that the greater seat-vote elasticities of majoritarian electoral systems will tilt policy in favor of consumers, while propor- tional systems should strengthen producers; and (b) that the pro-con- sumer bias of majoritarian systems should be manifested in systemati- cally lower prices. Empirical tests, controlling for the structural determi- nants of national levels estab- lished in the earlier law of one price literature, establish majoritarian elec- toral systems as a significant and robust predictor, lowering national levels in the mean OECD coun-

Democracy in the 21st century: can we be optimistic?

The prospects for the spread of democracy around the world in the 21st century appear to be bright, but there are also important reasons for pessimism. One is that politicians and constitution-writers in the democracies are not aware of, or choose to ignore, compelling social science evidence concerning the superiority of parliamentary systems of government and proportional representation (in contrast to presidential government and majoritarian electoral systems). The older democracies are not in danger of failing, but they are losing much of their democratic vitality, as seen in the decline of people's interest in politics, decreasing voter participation, and the serious weakening of political parties. For these problems, too, parliamentarism and proportional representation are at least partial remedies, but stronger measures (such as compulsory voting) also deserve to be considered seriously

Domestic Political Institutions and Exchange Rate Commitments in the Developing World

Policymakers use a fixed exchange rate regime to signal their commitment to low inflation and to exchange rate stability. Increasing economic integration and the rise of democratic institutions make it more difficult for policymakers to maintain the credibility of this commitment. We use binary probit (with a variety of corrections for autocorrelated and heteroscedastic disturbances) to test hypotheses relating democratic institutions to exchange rate regime choice on a sample of 76 developing countries over the period 1973‐1994. The empirical analysis indicates that domestic political preferences—as measured by the structure of domestic political institutions and the fractionalization of the party system—influence exchange rate regime choice. We find that floating exchange rate regimes are more likely in democratic than in nondemocratic polities and that democratic polities with majoritarian electoral systems are more likely to fix their exchange rates than those with systems of proportional representation. The growth of international capital markets is truly extraordinary. Cross-border capital flows dwarf those of international trade: recent estimates suggest that foreign exchange trading alone now exceeds one trillion dollars a day. The magnitude and volatile nature of international capital flows has led some political economists to suggest that increased economic integration and capital mobility has become so pervasive that it now acts as a “structural characteristic of the international system, similar to anarchy” (Keohane and Milner, 1996:257). These scholars point to globalization as a crucial factor leading to a convergence of economic policy in the industrialized world. While a wave of economic liberalization has swept OECD economies, governments in developing countries still use a variety of traditional economic tools to protect the relative autonomy of their domestic policies. Vital in this process is exchange rate policy for it is the exchange rate that serves as a buffer between international and domestic markets. Even after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of pegged exchange rates, most developing countries continue to fix the value of their currency to that of their major trading partner. The logic is clear: by fixing the domestic currency’s value to that of a trading partner, exchange rate volatility is minimized. As a result, bilateral flows of capital and goods are not disrupted by exchange rate uncertainty and

Preferential voting and political engineering: A comparative study

The preferential voting system used in Australia has received limited attention there in recent times, but considerably more interest internationally, where it is often known as the ‘alternative vote’. While the academic literature also usually refers to the ‘alternative vote’, this article will follow the local nomenclature of most of the countries cited — including Australia, Papua New Guinea and Sri Lanka — where the terms ‘preferential vote’ and ‘preferential voting’ are invariably used. The article begins by giving a brief overview of the history of preferential voting in Australia (where it has been a feature of national elections to the House of Representatives since 1918) and the abortive attempts to introduce the system in Great Britain and New Zealand. It examines the ‘political engineering’ potential of the preferential vote, including the claims made for preferential voting with regard to the new South Africa and the robust debate on the merits of preferential electoral systems that has taken place in Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka and Fiji. It concludes by identifying a range of possible advantages that preferential voting may have in comparison to other majoritarian electoral systems such as first-past-the-post, particularly for divided societies.

Dimensions of democracies

Abstract The conventional wisdom concerning the choice between majoritarian electoral systems and proportional representation (PR) ‐ and, more broadly, between majoritarian and consensus forms of democracy ‐ is that there is a trade‐off: PR and consensus democracy provide more accurate representation and better minority representation, but majoritarianism provides more effective government. A comparative analysis of 18 older and well‐established democracies, most of which are European democracies, shows that PR and consensus democracy indeed give superior political representation, but that majoritarian systems do not perform better in maintaining public order and managing the economy, and hence that the over‐all performance of consensus democracy is superior. This conclusion should also be tested among the growing number of slightly newer non‐European democracies, which are already old enough to have proved their viability and can be studied over an extended period of time. If its validity is confirmed ‐ and the evidence so far is very promising ‐it can have great practical significance for the future of democracy in the world.

Democracies: Forms, performance, and constitutional engineering

Abstract. The conventional wisdom concerning the choice between majoritarian electoral systems and proportional representation (PR) – and, more broadly, between majoritarian and consensus forms of democracy – is that there is a trade‐off: PR and consensus democracy provide more accurate representation and better minority representation, but majoritarianism provides more effective government. A comparative analysis of 18 older and well‐established democracies, most of which are European democracies, shows that PR and consensus democracy indeed give superior political representation, but that majoritarian systems do not perform better in maintaining public order and managing the economy, and hence that the over‐all performance of consensus democracy is superior. This conclusion should also be tested among the growing number of slightly newer non‐European democracies, which are already old enough to have proved their viability and can be studied over an extended period of time. If its validity is confirmed – and the evidence so far is very promising – it can have great practical significance for the future of democracy in the world.