Особливості проведення виборчих кампаній при різних виборчих системах

What factors influence the level of representation of women in parliaments? There are several explanatory models in the research literature, but a broad consensus is formed around one. Research shows that there is a strong correlation between the level of women's representation and the type of electoral system. It is noted that the high representation of women in Parliament is associated with the conduct of elections based on the proportional electoral system. The author emphasizes that scientists came to this statement as a result of, first, analyzing data from developed countries, consolidated democracies and, second, conducting cross-country research. The purpose of this article is to verify this provision in Russian conditions. To achieve this goal, the author collected empirical material based on lists of candidates (both Federal and single-mandate districts) of political parties. The research method was regression analysis. As a result of statistical calculations, the author came to the conclusion that the Duma elections under the proportional system do not ensure high representation of women. It is shown that the voting system does not work automatically in terms of determining the proportion of women parliamentarians. Electoral systems are one of the many factors that can affect women's representation in legislative bodies. Other factors are party characteristics such as party ideology.

In political science, the classic works on voting systems rarely noticed their impact on the representation of women. It was not until the 1980s that scholars showed that the type of electoral system was a key predictor of women’s legislative recruitment. This new knowledge was quickly taken up by those advising on policy for transitional democracies and by electoral reformers in the old democracies. In the 1990s, it was combined with knowledge of how quotas might increase women’s political representation—particularly when there was a good fit between quotas, the type of electoral system and party structures. Increased awareness of intersectionality made electoral system scholarship more complicated—for LGBTQ minorities first-past-the-post systems might offer greater rewards than proportional representation (PR).

The political history of Italy and Japan during the post-war period is strongly ­associated with two dominant parties: the Italian Christian Democrats (DC) and the Japanese Liberal Democrat Party (LDP). Notwithstanding this similarity, the electoral and party systems of the two countries differed. Italy had a fragmented and polarized multiparty system under proportional representation (PR), while Japan was known for the dominance of a single ruling party under the unusual single nontransferable vote (SNTV) system. However, in the 1990s, both countries experienced electoral system changes through the adoption of mixed electoral systems. Electoral reform was enacted first in Italy in 1993 and in the following year in Japan. Later in 2005, Italy switched from a mixed majoritarian electoral system (MMES) to a further “hybridized” electoral system, which gives a seat bonus to the party or coalition winning a plurality of votes, but in which seat allocation to coalition partners follows a proportional rule. In Japan, the MMES adopted in 1994 was changed as well, although in minor ways. For example, in the 1996 elections, the mixed system elected 300 MPs from single member districts (SMDs) and 200 from 11 PR districts; in the 2000 elections, the number of PR seats decreased from 200 to 180.KeywordsElectoral SystemParty SystemProportional RepresentationLiberal Democrat PartyCoalition GovernmentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Why do some interest groups lobby politicians and others lobby bureaucrats? We theorize lobbying venue choices and intensity as a function of contract enforceability with policy makers, politicians, or bureaucrats. We argue that organizational structures of interest groups, in particular, whether they are centralized or decentralized, substantially affect their lobbying strategies because they are associated with different ability to monitor and enforce contracts with policy makers and punish them when they fail. We further demonstrate that the effect of centralized versus decentralized structure on venue choices is conditional on the types of electoral system: majoritarian, semiproportional (single, nontransferable vote: SNTV), or proportional representation systems. We test this argument using longitudinal survey data on lobbying which span two decades and cover around 250 interest groups in various sectors and issue areas in Japan. The results lend strong support to our argument about contract enforceability under alternative electoral systems.

The article explores some trade-offs between two democratic goods: intelligibility and ideological diversity that different types of electoral systems – proportional representation and single member plurality – often involve through the way in which they affect the number of significant political parties in a polity. The article reviews practices that can alleviate those trade-offs and provides a sketch of what we can and should want to achieve within the limits of each system from the normative vantage point of deliberative democratic theory.

Is plurality or majority electoral reform a sensible option in Germany’s muddled electoral system debate? Yes, it is. Since Germany’s mixed-member proportional system fails to concentrate the party system in a sufficient way, Peggy Matauschek searches for a suitable alternative to the principle of proportional representation. She discusses the following options according to their contextual conditions: single-member plurality and majority electoral systems—like the alternative vote system—, parallel systems, proportional representation systems with a low district magnitude and majority bonus systems. In light of its balanced performance, the study advocates the introduction of a system with a majority bonus for a coalition.

This study examines how switching to a mixed electoral system affects the level of women’s representation in national parliaments compared to the original system. Political science theories suggest that the type of electoral system influences the level of female representation in parliaments. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that changing to a mixed system will bring changes. We combine two levels of analysis. First, we closely examine six countries that have shifted from majoritarian or proportional systems to mixed systems to assess the impact on women’s representation in parliaments. To ensure that changes in women’s representation are not merely a result of global trends, we compare each country’s share of women in parliament with a country of similar culture and the same initial electoral system, but where the electoral system has not changed. Second, we conduct a large global crossnational comparison using multivariate regressions to examine the broader effects of adopting mixed systems. As expected, our findings show that moving from a majoritarian electoral system to a mixed system increases women’s representation in parliaments. However, unexpectedly the findings show that moving from a proportional system to a mixed system does not decrease women’s representation in parliaments.

The basic question this work is trying to answer is: what is wrong in the electoral system in Serbia. At the same time, it is proposing certain improvements of the proportional electoral system. The author is not yet definitely opting for return on the majority electoral system, although he thinks that it is better than current one. Before processing the main, headline topic, the article cursorily deals with electoral law, electoral systems and history of elections.

What is the relationship between the type of electoral system and the degree of party fragmentation in electoral autocracies? According to Duverger’s hypothesis, proportional representation (PR) is positively associated with party fragmentation. This study investigates whether this hypothesis holds true in non-democratic political systems that hold elections. I propose that, unlike in democracies, PR is negatively correlated with the level of party fragmentation in electoral autocracies. To test this hypothesis, I utilize panel data encompassing 37 non-democratic nations that held elections from 1975 to 2010. The results demonstrate that PR is inversely linked to both the number and size of political parties. The effective number of parties (ENP) is employed as a measure of party fragmentation, estimating the weighted size and quantity of political parties.

One of the limits of previous studies using respondents’ self‐placements and subjective party placements to examine levels of citizen‐government congruence is that they were limited to the post‐1995 period. This article extends the number of elections where it is possible to examine levels of citizen‐government ideological congruence with a survey‐based approach. In particular, a unique dataset has been collected that combines data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and several national election studies. The results confirm recent studies that show that levels of citizen‐government ideological congruence are similar under majoritarian and proportional representation (PR) systems. Such studies, however, did not provide evidence that congruence is maintained over the course of a government's mandate. This article introduces, therefore, two measures of citizen‐government congruence that address this issue and that may revive the debate about which electoral systems strengthen the citizen‐government connection: citizen‐government congruence at the end of government mandates and change in congruence between elections. The results indicate that governments stay closer to the median citizens between elections under PR systems than under majoritarian systems. It is found, however, that this decrease in congruence in majoritarian systems is not detrimental to the point of observing smaller levels of congruence at the end of government mandates under majoritarian systems than under PR systems.

Based on recent work that suggests that voters in proportional representation (PR) systems have incentives to cast strategic votes, the authors hypothesize that levels of strategic voting are similar in both first-past-the-post (FPTP) and PR systems. Comparing vote intentions in majoritarian elections in the United States, Mexico, Britain, and Israel to PR elections in Israel and the Netherlands, the authors find that a substantial proportion of the voters desert their most preferred candidate or party and that patterns of strategic voting across FPTP and PR bear striking similarities. In every election, smaller parties tend to lose votes to major parties. Because there tend to be more small parties in PR systems, tactical voting is actually more common under PR than under FPTP. The findings suggest that whatever the electoral system, voters focus on the policy consequences of their behavior and which parties are likely to influence policy outcomes following the election.

This article assesses the differences in the design of electoral institutions and electoral outcomes in 20 Eastern and 20 Western European democracies. It finds broad similarities between the types of electoral systems that have been adopted in the two parts of the continent. The size and shape of the party systems that have been generated by these systems are also similar overall. Yet statistical analysis demonstrates that the electoral systems of Eastern Europe are doing far more ‘work’ than their Western counterparts to reduce the size of party systems, and that they are more likely to use exclusionary thresholds to achieve this end than manipulation of constituency size. Possible reasons for these differences are discussed with reference to the factors that impinge on electoral system design.

Institutions and Market Reform in Emerging Economies: A Rent Seeking Perspective

India has stood the test of time as the world’s largest democracy. Governments have been formed after free elections both at the central and the state levels. The peaceful transfer of power has become a regular feature of the Indian political system. There have sometimes been sporadic outbreaks of violence during election campaigns, but these have always soon subsided. The stability of the system has also been proven by the fact that the military has never intervened in internal politics and has always remained under civilian control. But under the calm surface of democratic continuity there has been a great deal of political change. For a long time, the Congress Party ruled India as a “centre party”, supporting the state and being supported by it. This was the case at the centre as well as in the federal states. The majority voting system (“first past the post”) favoured the “centre party” due to triangular contests in which opposition parties of the right and the left neutralised each other. The Congress Party always relied on the large “minorities” — Muslims and Untouchables — that had no chance to establish viable parties of their own under this electoral system. If India had a system of proportional representation, this would be different. The minorities would have their own parties that would be coveted coalition partners. But under the prevailing electoral system the Congress Party was itself, so to speak, a “permanent coalition”. This also explains why this party was not prepared to enter into coalitions with other parties even when it lost elections and could have remained in power with the help of coalition partners.

In some political and science circles (including Poland) there are articulated views on the crucial role of electoral systems in the process of political competition. Therefore they express the opinion about prevalence of certain electoral arrangements in terms of the implementation of certain political preferences. Often hopes for the reform of the political system are associated with the changes of the electoral systems. In the Great Britain (the United Kingdom) and other English-speaking countries citizens have formed community associations whose aim is the change from the majority to the proportional electoral system. In the effect we have more proportional election result and extension of real electoral bid to a larger number of political parties. On the other hand, in Poland, we have seen the opposite trend. Proponents of single-mandate constituencies depreciate the system of proportional representation. They express the belief in the positive effects of the majority system in the parliamentary elections. Radicals endorse the idea that only those electoral solutions are synonymous with electoral democracy and they are a way to reduce the pathologies of political life. In terms of these issues there have arisen many misconceptions and political myths. The main purpose of this article is to pay attention to trends in the areas of electoral reforms in the world. The author tries to answer the following research questions: 1) What electoral systems were popular in the world in individual periods from the 19th to the 21st centuries? 2) What tendencies appear in changes of electoral systems in the recent years? 3) What is the being of popularity phenomenon of mixed-member electoral systems? In the recent years the most popular electoral systems are: proportional representation with open lists and majority rules in single member-districts.