Single-member Districts Research Articles

Electing the House: The Adoption and Performance of the U.S. Single-Member District Electoral System. By Jay K. Dow. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2017. 332p. $50.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Electing the House: The Adoption and Performance of the U.S. Single-Member District Electoral System. By Jay K. Dow. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2017. 332p. $50.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The Size and Sources of Municipal Incumbency Advantage in Canada

This article uses a new dataset of nearly 2,000 municipal elections from 1874 to 2018 to estimate the size of municipal incumbency advantage in Canada for the first time. Incumbency increases the probability that a candidate will win the next election by more than 30 percentage points and accounts for well over half of overall incumbent success. Incumbency advantage varies modestly by institutional context but varies substantially over time, with a distinct decrease during a period of partisan elections in the mid-twentieth century. These findings represent one of the first estimates of municipal incumbency advantage in an advanced democracy outside the United States and provide a new approach to estimating and comparing incumbency advantage in multi-member and single-member districts. The findings suggest important similarities between Canadian and American municipal elections, demonstrate that incumbency advantage has varied significantly at the municipal level over time, and illustrate the value of historical election data for scholars of urban electoral politics.

Mandate type, electoral safety, and defections from the party line: The conditional mandate divide in the German Bundestag, 1949–2013

Research on mixed electoral systems provides inconclusive findings on the question whether members of parliament (MPs) elected in single-member districts are more likely to vote against the party line than MPs elected via closed party lists. This article rejects both the hypothesis of a general “mandate divide” and the competing claim that contamination effects completely wash out behavioral differences. Instead, we argue that electoral incentives to defect are stronger for a specific type of MP—those who run only in a district and are electorally insecure. Statistical analyses of roll call votes in the German Bundestag covering more than 60 years support this “conditional mandate divide” against alternative hypotheses. These findings suggest a more nuanced view on electoral system effects in mixed electoral systems and highlight the importance of electoral competition for incentivizing MPs to side with district demands if those conflict with the party line.

Lawyers and law graduates in parliaments as a consequence of SMD electoral systems: a comparison of Japan, South Korea, and Germany

AbstractThis study addresses the question of why so many of the world's legislators are lawyers or law graduates. Drawing from previous studies on lawyer-legislators and electoral systems, it develops the argument that ‘first-pass-the-post’ single-member district electoral systems presume a principal-agent logic of representation and are therefore conducive to political parties selecting representatives with either occupational experience or educational training in the field of law. By contrast, proportional representation (PR) elections presume a microcosm model of representation incentivizing parties to select candidates representing diverse demographic and occupational backgrounds. This conjecture is tested by examining legislator backgrounds in three large parliaments with mixed electoral systems: Germany, Japan, and South Korea. As expected, single-member plurality elections are linked to a greater share of lawyers and law graduates in parliaments compared to those elected via PR even after controlling for several alternative explanations.

Strategic Entry and Strategic Voting in Majoritarian Systems

Electoral rules impact the need for and ability of voters to coordinate around a candidate or candidates. In this paper, we examine two commonly used majoritarian electoral systems—the multiple nontransferable votes (MNTV) and single-member districts decided by plurality (SMDP). We look at strategic entry by elites and strategic voting by citizens. Coordination failures at either stage could keep teams of candidates out of office who might have otherwise been chosen to govern and could prevent voters from putting in office the candidates who would best represent them. For causal identification, we leverage the design of Brazil’s senate, where both systems are alternately used. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that elites do not coordinate well under SMDP but do relatively better under MNTV while voters coordinate equally (well) across both systems.

Reforming An Electoral System – An Experiment That Failed: Romania 2008–2012

ABSTRACTAn increasing number of electoral systems is being introduced which seeks to combine single-member districts with a proportional allocation of seats according to parties’ national vote shares. One such system, that differed in its key features from many others, was introduced in Romania in 2008 and used in that year’s general elections, when it performed reasonably well. It did not at the next elections in 2012, when an unforeseen consequence of a coalition winning more than half of the votes cast was that a number of ‘overhang’ seats was allocated to each house in the bi-cameral parliament, representing some 20 per cent of the total number of elected members. The system was then abandoned and replaced by the previously-used proportional representation system. This paper describes the system and its operation at the two elections, discussing the reasons for its introduction and later abandonment.

Translating Descriptive Representation into Substantive Representation: The Role of Electoral Institutions in Urban School Districts in Texas

Scholarship has explored how descriptive representation translates into substantive representation in American schools with mixed findings. I argue here that electoral institutions condition this relationship between descriptive and substantive representation, with Hispanic representatives elected to serve single-member districts providing better representation for bilingual students than their at-large counterparts, particularly when demand for bilingual programming is high. Using data from urban school campuses in Texas from 2003 to 2011, I seek to assess how the interaction between electoral institutions, descriptive representation, and demand affects substantive representation, here measured as bilingual funding. Results demonstrate that Hispanic representatives, elected to serve either at-large or a single-member district, have a positive effect on campus bilingual funding when there is low demand for the program. Yet, only Hispanic representatives elected to serve single-member districts substantively represent bilingual constituencies when there is high demand.

Social networkers and careerists: Explaining high-intensity activism among British party members

Drawing on survey data on the members of six British parties gathered in the immediate aftermath of the general election of 2015, this article asks what motivates members to engage in high-intensity election campaign activism. It argues that two factors are especially prominent: the aspiration to pursue a career in politics (which only accounts for a small minority of these activists) and becoming integrated into a local social network (which accounts for a much larger proportion). By contrast, members who lack either of these characteristics, but are mainly motivated to join by ideological impulses, largely restrict themselves to low-intensity activity. These findings are likely to be especially pertinent to countries with single-member district electoral systems.

Show Your Flag or Be Everyone's Friend?: The Effects of District Magnitude on Vote-Securing Strategies

In this paper, we argue that a difference in district magnitude—the number of seats per district—causes variation in electoral competition. We show that in the Single-Member District with Plurality voting (SMDP) system, voters may cast their ballots using the candidate’s “visual cues”—this is particularly notable when voters cannot rely on party labels. We quantify the candidate’s smile in a replicable form by using automated facial recognition technology. Using data from local assembly elections in an urban area in Japan, we showed how a candidate’s smile, the proxy of the candidate’s visual, is effective in gathering floating votes in SMDP, but it does not increase the vote share in Multi-Member Districts with Single Non-Transferable Voting (MMDs/SNTV) system.

Is democratic nomination good for women's candidacy? Examining the case of Taiwan

ABSTRACTIn order to understand why women tend to be under-nominated even though they are more likely to be elected compared to men in Taiwan, this study focuses on the nomination systems of two major political parties. The country provides a critical case of inter-party and intra-party comparison for women’s nomination, as the two major parties diverge in their practice of candidate selection. Further, the electoral reforms from the SNTV (Single Non-Transferable Vote) system to the SMD (Single-Member District) system have led parties to alter their strategies in selecting women candidates. With the nomination dataset compiled over the past 20 years, this study finds that more centralized nomination is more conducive to women’s candidacy, even under different electoral systems. Under the old SNTV system, the more centralized KMT (Kuomintang) nominated more women candidates than did the decentralized DPP (Democratic Progressive Party). Under the new SMD system, women’s representation as a whole actually increased in Taiwan, which runs contrary to the general expectation, compared to the multimember-district system and so the SMD tends to inhibit women’s representation. The growing centralization in the major parties after the electoral rule changed to the new system, has enhanced women’s candidacies, but the higher male incumbent advantage is a hurdle still to be overcome in the long term. This study argues that although electoral rules have altered the parameters of party competition, party nomination are critical factors for explaining changing women’s representation.

Wiedza i preferencje dotyczące systemów wyborczych. badanie na przykładzie jednomandatowych okręgów wyborczych

Wiedza i preferencje dotyczące systemów wyborczych. badanie na przykładzie jednomandatowych okręgów wyborczych

Understanding Legislative Speech in the Turkish Parliament: Reconsidering the Electoral Connection under Proportional Representation

AbstractWe aim to address two weaknesses of the growing literature on legislative debate and legislative behaviour. First, most studies on legislative speech focus on the role of party unity and individual dissent on speech-making behaviour and largely ignore the role of legislators’ own calculations regarding their electoral vulnerability. Secondly, research on legislative behaviour that studies mechanisms other than legislative speech usually explores the role of electoral incentives where there is Single Member District (SMD) or open list system, and largely neglects closed list proportional representation systems with multi-member districts. We suggest that, similar to SMD and single transferable vote systems, the electoral vulnerability of individual legislators provides incentives to nurture a personal reputation and signals their efforts to their constituents and party leadership. Using a novel dataset of parliamentary speeches in the Turkish Parliament (2007–2011), we demonstrate that legislators who are electorally more vulnerable participate more in legislative debate, and are more likely to deliver constituency-related speeches.

Mixed-member electoral systems, best loser rules, and the descriptive representation of women

Proportional representation (PR) electoral systems are commonly considered more advantageous for the election of women compared to majoritarian electoral systems. In mixed electoral systems, female candidates are often more likely to be elected through the PR tier compared to women running in single-member district races. While most mixed systems employ a closed-list, a number of legislatures use a best loser provision whereby losing district candidates are ordered on the PR list based on their performance in single-member districts. This paper examines the extent to which best loser laws impact the election of women using candidate data from sub-national legislatures in Mexico and Germany and Japan's House of Representatives. We find the contamination of PR lists by single-member district results reduces the advantage women candidates have in the PR tier. Best loser limits the ability of political parties to use PR to represent groups underrepresented in single-member district elections.

Electing the House: The Adoption and Performance of the U.S. Single-Member District Electoral System

Electing the House: The Adoption and Performance of the U.S. Single-Member District Electoral System

Social media popularity and election results: A study of the 2016 Taiwanese general election.

This paper investigates the relationship between candidates’ online popularity and election results, as a step towards creating a model to forecast the results of Taiwanese elections even in the absence of reliable opinion polls on a district-by-district level. 253 of 354 legislative candidates of single-member districts in Taiwan’s 2016 general election had active public Facebook pages during the election period. Hypothesizing that the relative popularity of candidates’ Facebook posts will be positively related to their election results, I calculated each candidate’s Like Ratio (i.e. proportions of all likes on Facebook posts obtained by candidates in their district). In order to have a measure of online interest without the influence of subjective positivity, I similarly calculated the proportion of daily average page views for each candidate’s Wikipedia page. I ran a regression analysis, incorporating data on results of previous elections and available opinion poll data. I found the models could describe the result of the election well and reject the null hypothesis. My models successfully predicted 80% of winners in single-member districts and were effective in districts without local opinion polls with a predictive power approaching that of traditional opinion polls. The models also showed good accuracy when run on data for the 2014 Taiwanese municipal mayors election.

The center-right in a search for unity and the re-emergence of the neo-fascist right

ABSTRACTIn 2017, the parties of the centre-right camp – Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, Matteo Salvini’s (Northern) League and Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia – faced the puzzle of deciding whether to participate in the imminent general elections as allies or as rivals. On the one hand they had partially different aims (especially in relation to the European Union issue) and the problem of choosing the leadership of the alliance; on the other, the new electoral system, partially based on single-member districts, forced them to present common candidates in order to maximize their chances of reaching a majority of seats in parliament. In this article, we outline the stages through which the centre-right parties attempted to solve this puzzle over the course of the year, finally reaching an agreement to make a formal electoral alliance. In the final section of the article, we focus on one additional political actor of the right wing: the neo-fascist movements, notably Forza Nuova and CasaPound, which received significant media coverage during 2017. We describe how these movements were able to gain center stage and what this implied for the mainstream centre-right parties.

The more concentrated, the better represented? The geographical concentration of immigrants and their descriptive representation in the German mixed-member system

Does the geographical concentration of ethnic minorities influence their descriptive representation in closed-list systems? Counterintuitive to the idea that single-member district electoral rules are necessary for minorities’ geographical representation, we argue that, in closed-list systems, parties are incentivised to allocate promising list positions to those minority candidates who are based in geographical areas where minorities concentrate. Empirically, we provide a case study of the list positions of dual candidates of immigrant origin running in the German mixed-member system in 2013. Results show a relationship between the list positions of candidates of immigrant origin and geographical concentrations of immigrant-origin residents.

Strategic alliances: Red, green, or “watermelon” candidates in Mexican legislative elections

What role do small parties play in new democracies? Although some research has posited that these parties developed to promote policies that the major parties were not addressing, we argue that they are as opportunistic as their larger party competitors. To test our argument, we examine the legislative electoral alliances between the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the Ecological Green Party of Mexico (PVEM) in single member districts from 2006 to 2015. In alliance districts, the parties distribute the districts between them: those in which the candidate is from the PRI and those in which the candidate is from the PVEM. There is then a second dynamic in these electoral alliances: Many of the PVEM candidates are former PRI politicians, whom we refer to as “watermelon” candidates, as they are green on the outside and red on the inside. We argue that the parties will select the alliance strategy that will be most electorally beneficial—running a PRI, PVEM, or watermelon candidate. We find that running a PRI or watermelon candidate increases the alliance’s probability of winning. Our findings have important implications for understanding Mexican party politics as well as the role of small parties and party competition in developing democracies.

Wpływ jednomandatowych okręgów wyborczych na wyniki wyborów do rad gmin w gminach powyżej 20 tys. mieszkańców

The aim of this article is to analyze the impact of changes in the electoral formula on the results of local elections in municipalities with more than 20,000 inhabitants. In this municipalities, existing proportional formula was replaced by FPTP system with single member districts. In this study, author makes a comparative analysis of the results of the municipal councils elections since 2002. Empirical analysis is based on quantitative data of the National Electoral Commission. The research proves that the change of the electoral formula was important factor which affected the results of the elections in the municipalities with more than 20,000 inhabitants.

The range and limitation of sub-national regime variations under electoral authoritarianism: The case of Russia

ABSTRACTAs has been demonstrated by scholars, different levels of a polity may encompass different political regimes. In this study we examine variations in regional political regimes which have developed under Russia's system of electoral authoritarianism. Comparing the results of two cycles of regional assembly elections (2008–12 and 2013–17) we analyse and compare elections results and levels of electoral contestation in both the party list (PL) and single member district (SMD) contests. This allows us to identify the range of sub-national regime variations: ‘hegemonic authoritarian’, ‘inter-elite bargain authoritarian’, ‘clearly-competitive authoritarian’, and ‘moderately-competitive authoritarian’ regions. Approximately half of the regions demonstrate stable electoral patterns across both cycles. At the same time, none of the regions go beyond the authoritarian limitations imposed by the Russian regime. The variation is explained by a combination of structural and agency factors with a prevalence of the latter.