Multimember Districts Research Articles

'Kick Them Out' as a Voting Strategy: Theory and Evidence from Multi-member District Elections

'Kick Them Out' as a Voting Strategy: Theory and Evidence from Multi-member District Elections

Going negative when spoiled for choice? Destabilizing and boomerang effects of negative political messaging in multiparty systems with multimember districts

ABSTRACT Classical electoral behaviour theories have associated possible benefits of negative campaigning with two-party plurality systems due to their zero-sum nature. Nevertheless, negative campaigning is a widely used electoral strategy outside of these contexts, despite scant evidence of its benefits for political parties and candidates who employ it. Our research question is simple – is negative campaign messaging effective for attackers in multiparty systems with multimember districts? Or does it create a ‘boomerang effect’ in this context, for which the producer of the message faces a backlash? Multiparty systems with multimember districts should, according to the literature, be scenarios where the effects of negative campaigning are most complex if not unpredictable. This paper uses Facebook political messages to inform a survey experiment design that tests the effects of negative political messaging on voters. We employ this survey in Ireland, which uses the single transferable vote, an electoral system which magnifies outcome uncertainty for attackers. Our results suggest that negative messaging in this context produces both the intended effect and a boomerang effect for the sponsor of the message. These countervailing results suggest a net null effect for the efficacy of negative messaging.

Congressional Redistricting and Strategic Copartisans: Partisan Gerrymandering in Pennsylvania, 1800–1824

The group-centered theory of party development provides a new theoretical framework for understanding early party development. Specifically, it provides a logical framework to understand why early state legislators were motivated to engage in partisan gerrymandering during a period without national organizations. I use Pennsylvania as a case study to determine if partisanship influenced the creation of congressional district maps in 1802, 1812, and 1822. Using county-level congressional election returns and state legislative journals, I provide evidence of strategic partisan gerrymandering by the Democratic-Republicans during each apportionment year. I also show that the Federalist minority in Pennsylvania knew the national political impact of the process and attempted to influence congressional maps for their own partisan advantage. Lastly, I demonstrate how multi-member districts were the Democratic-Republicans’ weapon of choice to engage in partisan gerrymandering throughout the period. These results highlight the connection between state legislatures and congressional party politics during the first party era.

Electoral Systems and Geographic Representation

AbstractWho gets represented in legislatures, and how does this depend on electoral institutions? Others have asked this question from the perspective of gender, race, and class. We focus on space, asking whether MPs disproportionately come from some places rather than others and how this depends on electoral rules. Using data on over 13,000 legislators in sixty-two democracies, we developed a new measure to determine whether the spatial distribution of MP birthplaces matched the spatial distribution of the citizens they represented. Contrary to received wisdom, single-member district systems do not have more geographically representative parliaments than multi-member district systems, while mixed-member systems perform significantly better than both. We attribute the higher spatial representativeness of mixed-member systems to the contamination effects in their single-member tier. We present evidence for this explanation from a within-country analysis of elections in Italy, the UK, and Germany.

Minority turnout and representation under cumulative voting. An experiment.

Under majoritarian election systems, securing the participation and representation of minorities remains an open problem, made salient in the US by its history of voter suppression. One remedy recommended by the courts is the adoption of Cumulative Voting (CV) in multi-member districts: each voter has as many votes as open positions but can cumulate votes on as few candidates as desired. Historical experiences are promising but also reflect episodes of minority activism. We present the results of a controlled lab experiment that isolates the role of the voting rule from other confounds. Although each voter is treated equally, theory predicts that CV should increase the minority's turnout relative to the majority and the minority's share of seats won. The experimental results strongly support both theoretical predictions.

In the right place, at the right time: Opportunity structures and candidates’ chances of getting elected for the first time

The foundational principle of representative democracy is that legislative elites can be replaced in elections. Yet, first-time parliamentary entries have received little attention. We present the first systematic attempt to examine the conditions of first-time parliamentary entry in multimember district PR systems. We introduce an overlooked explanatory factor, candidates' short-term opportunity structure. While controlling for personal vote-earning attributes (PVEAs), we examine how competitive context shapes newcomers' chances in a pure OLPR system where party elites cannot skew competition between candidates. Our register-based analysis of candidacies in seven Finnish parliamentary elections (1995–2019, n = 7548) shows that while personal qualities enhance candidates’ chances, first-time entry is restricted by the competitive context, especially the decisions of incumbent MPs. The strong impact of exceptional PVEAs suggests that other “big fish” candidates may also shape competitive contexts. Overall, the study indicates that electoral competition can be rather restricted even in the most competitive electoral systems.

Trade Competitiveness, Constituency Interests, and Legislators' Attitudes Towards Trade Agreements

We argue that legislators’ trade attitudes reflect constituents’ economic interests. Concretely, we expect that legislators from districts that are highly competitive in international trade should be more supportive of trade agreements than legislators from noncompetitive districts. The strength of this relationship should be lower in multimember districts and for right‐wing legislators. Data based on surveys with 3,576 legislators from 16 Latin American countries and 48 legislative periods between 2005 and 2019 allow us to test these expectations. The surveys captured legislators’ attitudes towards trade agreements between their countries and the United States and the European Union, respectively, and the Pacific Alliance. We measure districts’ trade competitiveness with an innovative combination of household survey and trade data. The evidence supports all three expectations. The findings contribute to research on trade policymaking, public opinion towards trade, and legislator behavior.

On Curing Political Diseases: The Healing Power of Majoritarian Elections in Multi-Member Districts

AbstractDemocratic politics suffers from numerous diseases such as lack of inclusiveness, time-inconsistency, short-termism, negative campaigning, lack of trust in and between governments, and many more. These diseases affect all countries, albeit to a differing extent. How can they be cured? From a politico-economic perspective, an institutional approach is required. We look at a country where these political diseases seem to play a relatively minor role: Switzerland. So far, Switzerland is renowned for its extensive direct democracy and federalism. However, its electoral system has been largely neglected. It uniquely combines proportional representation and majoritarian elections on all government levels. In contrast to the international standard, Swiss majority votes do not take place in single-member districts but in multi-member districts. We analyze how the interplay of majoritarian elections in multi-member districts and proportional representation mitigates many of the political diseases.

The IMF Rice Liberalization Policy in Indonesia: The Case Study of Elite Behaviors in the Era of Gus Dur, Megawati, and SBY Government

The research aimed to explain elite behaviour in Indonesia's political reform era. This research was based on primary data collected from unstructured interviews with respondents or samples and secondary data collected from library studies. In analyzing the data collected, descriptive and qualitative methods are applied. This research found that adopting the electoral system of the Proportional Multi-Member District and the lack of power and authority distribution from elite to interest groups tended to result in the emergence of small and pragmatic political parties trying to get constituent votes using political mobilization of the constituent voters. The emergence of political parties induces a patron-client relationship between the political candidate and his constituent voters through a broker-generating oligarchy within the party. For that reason, the policy-making process in the rice sector depends on the relative power of ideologist party coalitions and pragmatic party coalitions. The changes in rice policy depended on the political interaction between the old and pragmatic political oligarchy and the new and ideologist political oligarchy. The stronger the political coalition of the new political oligarchy consisting of new ideologists and reformist political parties, the more protective the rice policy will be, and vice versa. That is why we suggested that the election system should be changed into Single-Member District Electoral System to create a smaller number of political parties to avoid the emergence of pragmatic political parties. And interest groups should be strengthened to prevent the dominant power of the oligarchy.

Constituents Ask Female Legislators to Do More

We test whether constituents ask women representatives to do more. In partnership with Republican and Democratic state legislators in multimember districts, we conducted a field experiment in which the politicians sent a survey to their constituents, asking about the issues they should work on. It was randomized whether citizens were contacted by their male or female representative. We find that female legislators receive 14% more issue requests per constituent they contact than male legislators. This increase in workload requests of female legislators occurs on a wide range of issues. Put simply, constituents ask female legislators to do more.

정치적·사회적 갈등의 통합을 위한 권력구조 및 선거제도 개선방안

During the 20th presidential election process, in addition to ideological and regional conflicts, which were chronic ills of Korean politics, gender conflicts and generational conflicts developed to a very serious level. The results showed that the candidates for support differed significantly depending on region, generation, and gender. If this trend continues, it is highly likely that politics will deeply entrench political hatred beyond political apathy throughout society by failing to perform its original role, social integration, and only playing a reverse function that deepens and triggers conflict. The current presidential system implies a winner-take-all structure, making it impossible to divide power. The election system fixes the two-party structure, limiting the people's various political options, and deepening the confrontation between the two political forces. There are pros and cons of the system, and it is necessary to choose the system over how to solve the problems of Korean society. Social integration is not only impossible under a system in which politics does not resolve various conflicts in society and expands social conflicts into political conflicts, but it can also lead to a crisis situation in the country. It is time for constitutional concerns to be fiercely demanded. Politics should be changed to a power structure that can be achieved on the basis of compromise and cooperation. To this end, it is desirable to change the four-year term of office to a four-year term of office and elect the president by a runoff vote, but to elect half of the members in the general election in the early half of the administration and the other half in the midterm elections. The public will have the opportunity to conduct an interim evaluation of the president and the National Assembly through two parliamentary elections. If a representative can be evaluated every two years to give prizes and punishments, it will be difficult for a imperial president or an irresponsible National Assembly to exist. If the National Assembly has the right to recommend the prime minister, it will be able to play an active role in selecting the prime minister if the opposition party wins the two-year parliamentary elections. It may also be possible to form a coalition government between the ruling and opposition parties. In addition, it is necessary to revise Article 28 of the “Act on the Operation of Public Institutions” to adjust the term of the head of a public institution from three years to two years, like directors and auditors. If the opposition party wins the parliamentary elections in line with the presidential and parliamentary elections, it should pave the way for the opposition party to recommend the heads of public institutions. We must be able to guarantee the pluralities of politics. If the president is elected on a runoff system, and the two-year parliamentary elections are elected based on the multimember district system, a new way for minority parties can be opened. The presidential candidate of the minority party is not forced to resign, but can unite according to the results of the first round of voting. If various political forces coexist in the National Assembly due to the entry of minority parties, they can act as a coordinator in the conflict phase. It should be reorganized into a constitutional system based on compromise and securing pluralism. Only then can political forces move in a direction that can coordinate and integrate conflicts.

Gender differences in campaigning under alternative voting systems: analysis of election manifestos

ABSTRACT Growing evidence reveals that candidate issue engagement differs between men and women. However, recent research suggests that individual-level differences among candidates should be small under the strategic incentives inherent in single-member district elections that encourage party rather than personal-vote seeking. We examine whether men and women candidates emphasize different issues in their electoral campaigns and if the magnitude of the gender gap varies under different electoral rules. Our analysis of 7497 Japanese election manifestos spanning more than 20 years, from 1986 to 2009, reveals significant gender differences in the issues candidates emphasize in their electoral campaigns, regardless of party affiliation or other attributes. Moreover, these differences remain salient after an extensive change from a multi-member district to single-member district electoral system.

Working as a team: Do legislators coordinate their geographic representation efforts in party-centred environments?

Why do legislators engage in geographic representation in party-centred electoral systems, where they face weak re-election incentives to cultivate a personal vote? Existing research offers cross-pressuring incentive structures and intrinsic localism motivations as individual-level factors to explain this puzzle. In this article, we propose an alternative argument based on the principle of collective action within party-internal structures of labour division. We argue that legislators elected in the same multi-member district and under the same party label (party delegations) share collective vote-seeking incentives to collaborate with each other in order to strike a balance between the collective benefits and individual costs of constituency-oriented activities. Results from a comparative study of written parliamentary questions in Germany and Spain support our argument. Specifically, the study suggests that individual localism attributes interact with the team composition of party delegations to shape constituency-orientated behaviour.

“A Triumph for Women” in Progressive Era Los Angeles: Socialist-Feminism, Coalition Building, and Independent Partisanship in the Political Career of Councilwoman Estelle Lawton Lindsey

In June 1915, socialist-feminist Estelle Lawton Lindsey became the first woman elected to the city council of a major metropolis in the United States. While Lindsey ran as a “woman’s candidate,” she won her seat on the Los Angeles City Council by constructing a broad and diverse electoral coalition. Although organized womanhood (largely white and middle class) constituted the heart of her coalition, she garnered significant backing from many reform constituencies, including trade unionists, socialists, progressive reformers, and African American community leaders. Lindsey turned coalition building into a successful electoral strategy for two major reasons. First, although Lindsey was a socialist, she ran for city council as an independent, adopting an independent partisanship, resting between the gendered political cultures of her day, that likely broadened her support among both female and male voters. Second, the structure of the city council election, in which candidates ran in a nonpartisan, at-large, and multimember district race, made the election of women like Lindsey possible in this period. Once elected, Lindsey championed measures tied to the goals of the electoral coalition that had embraced her candidacy and worked with coalition groups (especially women’s clubs) on specific policies. Despite robust support and collaboration for two years, Lindsey’s electoral coalition ultimately fragmented and doomed her reelection bid in 1917.

Pokusy o demokratizaci volebního systému ve druhé polovině šedesátých let a volby v roce 1971

The political liberalisation of the 1960s had its echo also in reflections about the need to democratise the Czechoslovak electoral system. Elections in communist Czechoslovakia were a farce: they were held in single-member districts, in which only one candidate run, leaving the voter with no choice. Act No 113/1967 of 30 November 1967 on elections to the National Assembly, and the accompanying Act No 114/1967 on elections to national committees, introduced multi-member districts in which the number of candidates was higher than the number of seats. Thus, for the first time since the 1948 elections, voters were given the chance to choose from a multitude of canditates, not just one. The first elections to be held this way were planned for the spring of 1968, but were – also in the context of the preparation of the constitutional act on the federal system – postponed first to autumn 1968 and then to the following year. The Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, which began on 21 August 1968, and the onset of what is called normalisation meant that the electoral reform was not realized at all. In the autumn of 1969, elections were again postponed until 1971. For these elections, a new electoral law was adopted, bringing back the old practice of single-member districts with but one candidate running. The elections held in 1976, 1981 and 1986 followed that undemocratic procedure.

Strategic Behavior in State Multimember Districts: Does Fielding One Candidate offer a Notable Advantage?

In several U.S. states, legislative districts for the lower chamber are structured as multi‐member districts (MMD) electing two or more individuals. Ten states use MMDs, the most common form is a district that elects two candidates (employed in AZ, ND, NJ, SD). Sometimes, parties in these states field only one strong candidate in districts where they have a registration disadvantage, believing this “single shot” strategy improves the election odds. Our research casts doubt on this tactic. It finds that lone Democrats in a pooled sample of three states see a noted disadvantage by widening the electoral gap by 3.3 percentage points on average, meaning that parties are better off running two candidates regardless of their relative quality. However, this effect varies within states. Republicans do not experience a disadvantage, though fewer Democratic‐leaning states employ this election method. This research has practical implications for party strategy in MMD states.

Party-related primacy effects in proportional representation systems: evidence from a natural experiment in Polish local elections

We study the primacy effects that occur when voters cast their votes because a candidate or party is listed first on a ballot. In the elections that we analyzed, there are three potential types of such effects that might occur when voters vote for (1) the first candidate listed on the ballot in single-member district (SMD) elections (candidate primacy); (2) the first party listed on the ballot in open-list proportional representation (OLPR) elections (party primacy); or (3) the first candidate on a party list in OLPR elections (list primacy). We estimated the party primacy effect (2) and established that there was no interaction between (2) and (3). A party primacy effect is especially difficult to estimate because parties’ positions on ballots are typically fixed in all multi-member districts (MMDs) and it is impossible to separate the first-position “bonus” from a party’s normal electoral performance. A rare natural experiment allowed us to estimate the primacy party bonus between 6.02 and 8.52% of all votes cast for the 2014 Polish local elections. We attribute the large size of such bonus to the great complexity of voting in the OLPR elections, especially the much longer ballots, voting in many simultaneous elections, and ballot design as a booklet rather than a sheet.

Rethinking Political Wellbeing in Representational Democracy in Japan

This study discusses how representational democracy is related to the issues of community wellbeing in that political promises are contested in process of election campaigns. Under the premises that many promises largely reflect issue of community wellbeing, we seek to enhance understanding of how styles of representative democracy impact community wellbeing by comparing aspects of single-member (SMD) and multimember districts (MMD) in the Japan case.Among the questions considered: (1) Do voters’ choices increase in SMD compared to MMD systems? (2) Does issue voting increase in SMD? (3) Do SMD systems expand policy debate? and, (4) Does the voters’ will determine the policies of elected representatives? We measure each of these variables, related to mechanisms for electing representatives, with an assumption that wellbeing is closely related to voters’ participation and satisfaction. Based on our analysis, we conclude that SMD is not better than MMD at promoting these aspects of community wellbeing.

Dynasties and Democracy: The Inherited Incumbency Advantage in Japan by Daniel M. Smith

Reviewed by: Dynasties and Democracy: The Inherited Incumbency Advantage in Japan by Daniel M. Smith Arthur Stockwin (bio) Dynasties and Democracy: The Inherited Incumbency Advantage in Japan. By Daniel M. Smith. Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 2018. xviii, 359 pages. $65.00, cloth; $30.00, paper. In one particular aspect of its political system, Japan is an international outlier. The Japanese since 1945 have elected to their House of Representatives a higher proportion of members belonging to political "dynasties" than any other comparable democracy or semidemocracy. The nearest comparator is the Republic of Ireland, where political "families" are a widely recognized feature of the political landscape. Daniel Smith, in one of the most fully researched studies of Japanese politics to appear in recent years, combines close scrutiny of such Japanese "dynasties" with international comparison. His theory combines rational choice with historical institutionalism, and his methodology involves complex statistical analysis. Having many parliamentary representatives related to others from the same biological family has implications for democracy. This may be especially serious where a member of Parliament (MP) "inherits" a parliamentary seat, in other words where a close relative of the existing holder [End Page 145] (typically son or son-in-law in Japan's male-dominated society) is elected in his place for the same electoral district. Smith opens chapter 7 with a telling quotation from Tom Paine, who in 1776 declared that since hereditary succession in politics "opens a door to the foolish, the wicked and the improper, it hath in it the nature of oppression. … and when [hereditary politicians] succeed to the government [they] are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions" (p. 239). As a rational political scientist, Smith does not engage in such polemics, but he is concerned with the normative implications of hereditary succession in politics. His prime task, however, is to unearth the nature and causality of this phenomenon in Japanese politics. He uses the Japanese House of Representatives Elections Dataset (JHRED) and, for international comparison, the Dynasties in Democracies Dataset, which covers 12 advanced industrial democracies. Even though his research covers Japanese parties in general, he concentrates on the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has been politically dominant since 1955 and where dynasties have been most prominent. Following historical institutionalism, Smith examines Japanese episodes of institutional reform, especially the electoral reform to the House of Representatives that occurred in 1994. This reform replaced a system originating in the mid-1920s, but which operated in its mature form between 1947 and 1994, when it was referred to as "SNTV in MMDs" (single nontransferable vote in multimember districts). Nearly all electoral districts elected three, four, or five members of the Lower House. This meant that for the LDP, different candidates for the same district competed with each other as much as they did with candidates of other parties. Smith rightly argues that under that system, conservative electors were voting for a candidate rather than for the LDP as a party. This in turn privileged name recognition, giving the son of a previous candidate a distinct advantage over his rivals. The heyday of political dynasties came in the years leading up to 1994. Under the post-1994 system multimember districts were replaced by single-member districts plus a minority of seats decided by proportional representation (PR). However, the seats elected through PR provided a second chance for LDP candidates defeated in single-member first-past-the-post (FPTP) districts. In much-diluted form, this recreated competition between fellow LDP candidates in the same geographic area. The reform decreased the number of dynasties, but many of them still survived. Smith is inclined to explain this by path dependency, reinforced by the weakly counterbalancing element of the parallel PR districts. Moreover, leading politicians such as Koizumi Junichirō, Abe Shinzō, Fukuda Yasuo, and Asō Tarō were all members of family dynasties. He accepts that not only do dynasties remain, but that they are particularly numerous in the cabinet, where dynasty members in recent cabinets have touched 60 per cent. He admits on [End Page 146] page 215 that "keeping track of dynastic politics at the top levels of power is enough to make one's head...

The Impact of the District’s Magnitude on the Gender Composition of the Municipal Deputy Corps

The purpose of the study is to explain the difference in the proportion of women deputies in the representative bodies of different municipalities. The author assesses the impact of the electoral districts size on the gender composition of municipal legislative bodies (dumas). A review of theoretical and empirical works shows that more women are elected to Parliament under the proportional representation system than under the majority system with single-mandate constituencies. According to the author, the decisive factor is not the type of the electoral system, but the size of the electoral district. Two working hypotheses were formulated. According to the first, representative bodies of municipalities, whose elections are held according to a majority system with multi-member districts, will have a higher representation of women than local dumas which are formed on the basis of a majority system with single-member districts. According to the second hypothesis, higher representation of women in the deputy corps of settlements can be associated with the holding of elections under the majority system with multi-mandate districts. To test the proposed hypotheses in the context of municipalities, empirical material was collected. The study was carried out on the data from the Sverdlovsk region. The database of indicators of municipalities of Rosstat, as well as the official websites of local administrations were used as the source of information. The method of multiple linear regression is used as the main research method. The data was analyzed with the Gretl applied statistical program. Statistical calculations have revealed a positive and statistically significant impact of multi-mandate constituencies-based elections on the proportion of women in the deputy corps, which contributes to the study of gender aspects of politics. It is shown that the size of the electoral district is important for the representation of women in the city councils. The article notes that the transition to holding elections of deputies on the basis of a majority system with multi-mandate districts will help increase the proportion of women in municipal representative bodies.