Advances in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems

The issue of unequal electoral turnout poses serious concerns for both the overall health of democratic politics, and the extent to which certain groups exert an unequal influence on the political process. This article explores the relationship between electoral rules such as: compulsory voting, electoral system proportionality, and voter registration with voter inequality in terms of age, income and education. This is examined using cross-national survey data and cross-level interactions between electoral institutions and socio-demographic variables. The final dataset is based on waves 2–4 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, and contains information on 133,000 individuals, within 45 countries, between 2001 and 2016. The results indicate that compulsory voting is associated with a significant reduction in turnout inequalities, while the effects of proportionality and voter registration are somewhat more mixed.

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.

Although the majority of studies on political knowledge document lingering gender-based differences in advanced industrial democracies, most contributors have drawn such conclusions from a single or a handful of countries, using limited batteries of political information items. Exploiting a pooled data set of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems encompassing 106 post-election surveys in forty-seven countries between 1996 and 2011, this article demonstrates that survey instrument–related factors, such as question format and content, as well as the overall difficulty of questions, are more consequential in shaping the size of gender gaps in political knowledge than institutional factors, such as electoral rules or opportunity structures. The research design of this article draws from almost three hundred different items measuring factual political knowledge using the broadest country coverage and most comprehensive approach to measurement to date.

Party identification is a well‐documented force in political behaviour. However, the vast majority of work on partisanship considers only its positive side, rather than recognizing that partisan identities may also have a negative component. Recent work has shown that negative partisanship has important effects, such as reinforcing partisan leanings, directing strategic behaviour and increasing the rate of straight‐ticket voting. This study takes a step back to explore the sources of such orientations, rather than the effects. Specifically, it considers whether the electoral system context contributes to the presence of negative affective orientations towards parties. Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, we examine the influence of factors related to electoral system features and consider whether their influence is moderated by voter sophistication. Data reveal significant variation in the rate of negative partisanship across countries, and that these differences are related to the electoral system context in which voters are making decisions. We also find some evidence that these effects are moderated by sophistication. This work adds to our understanding of the role of affect in political behaviour, as well as the impact that country‐level institutional factors can have upon the relationship between voters and parties.

This article considers the potential to use knowledge of expected electoral system effects to engage in electoral engineering. The review focuses on contributions made in the past dozen or so years and is limited to five specific questions: How do electoral systems affect (a) the proportionality of seats–votes relationships, (b) party proliferation, (c) the ideological nature of party competition, (d) voter turnout, and (e) the degree of match between the preferences of citizens and the policy choices of the government?

Articulation and Concordance: A Dialogue on Civil–Military Relations in Fiji

Despite the rich and growing body of research addressing how turnout and party choice depend on the institutional context, far less is known about the impact of the political environment on voters’ propensity to vote for candidates – not parties. Recent single-country studies have focused almost exclusively on individual-level resource- and identity-based differences in preference voting. Combining data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) and Participation and Representation in Modern Democracies (PARTIREP) election studies in six countries, this article provides the first comprehensive, cross-national test of the impact of macro-contextual factors on a voter’s decision to indicate a candidate preference, instead of simply casting a party list vote. It demonstrates that both the failure of preference votes to affect the allocation of seats and choice overload dissuade voters from marking a candidate name on the ballot. These contextual factors affect informed and uninformed voters differently, moreover. The findings have important implications for electoral scholars and political practitioners when designing electoral systems.

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.

Though many empirical analyses on affective polarization demonstrate that women hold a higher level of affective polarization than men in industrialized democracies, a theoretical explanation for the gender difference is hardly discussed in the literature. Using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (Module 3) and a causal mediation analysis model, we find that women's higher level of affective polarization in Western Europe is substantially and significantly explained by their stronger disapproval of populist radical right‐wing parties as well as their greater concern for issues around gender and the natural environment. On the one hand, the results confirm that the mediation role of issue politics found in the United States is also observed in Western Europe. On the other hand, the results imply that affective polarization in Western Europe is connected with the politics of the populist radical right.

How does the mass public form attitudes on electoral rules and reforms? Existing research on this question reveals a trade-off between principles, such as fairness, and partisan self-interest. I use two survey experiments on state legislative redistricting to explore how voters weigh principles against partisan self-interest when forming opinions on electoral reforms. First, I ask whether the public’s partisan self-interest motivation stems more from individual representation considerations or broader partisan power considerations. I find that both considerations provide a powerful enough incentive to activate partisan self-interest regarding preferences for state legislative district maps. Unexpectedly, the two considerations have quite similar effects on public support for redistricting reforms. Second, I explore the principles versus partisan self-interest trade-off through the lens of loss aversion, a concept developed in behavioral economics. In line with expectations, I find that preventing loss provides a more powerful incentive for Americans to violate democratic principles than achieving partisan gain. In sum, this research sheds light on voters’ decision between principles and partisan self-interest in the formation of opinion on electoral reform.

The main purpose of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of why African electoral systems should be reformed and how to do so in order to improve the quality of representation, participation, and government effectiveness.We attempt to offer a generic framework, a menu, so to speak, whereby African political parties and policy makers can reflect on the current state of play vis-à-vis their electoral systems and then decide whether a comprehensive or partial electoral reform agenda is needed.The paper also delineates the various institutions and stakeholders that should be involved in the electoral system reform process.This is a call to improve the reform process instead of entrusting it with a limited range of state-sponsored institutions, which often create more problems than those they contrive to solve.The paper is divided into four sections: a) a synoptic exposé of electoral reforms; b) the various types of electoral reforms and the factors which militate against them; c) lessons from the African experience with electoral system reforms; and d) an analysis of the main stakeholders required to steer a comprehensive electoral system reform agenda.

ABSTRACTThis article explores how replacement rules for midterm vacancies affect legislative turnover in the context of majoritarian and proportional electoral systems. The differing electoral rules and replacement procedures for the two chambers of the Australian parliament over more than a century permit an analysis of the complex interplay between institutional rules, party strategy, and patterns of representation between 1901 and 2013. Since 1901, the Australian House of Representatives has been committed to single member electoral systems and by-elections for filling midterm vacancies, but major changes to both the electoral system and midterm replacement rules for the Australian Senate have played a critical role in enhancing party control of Senate careers.

When politics is not just a man's game: Women's representation and political engagement

Right-wing populism has been gaining traction over the past two decades. Once relatively minor players in democratic politics, populist parties today mobilize millions of voters and garner unprecedented electoral support with their antiimmigrant discourse. But what has changed to make populists so much stronger now than in the last century? Explanations in the literature tend to focus either on economic concerns or the cultural threat posed by immigrants with distinct languages and traditions. This paper examines these explanations from the literature and builds on them to argue that perceptions of economic and cultural threats feed off each other, and increasingly so with increased immigration from less culturally similar regions. We begin with the assumption that voter sentiment toward non-natives runs the gamut from strongly negative to positive, with more voters being willing to support right-wing populists at the polls in line with increases in perceived economic concerns and fears that immigration will dilute or drown out native culture. When these combine — when increased flows of culturally distant immigrants coincide with economic hard times — voters who normally would support mainstream parties and tolerate immigration are more likely to turn to populists. We test arguments from the literature and our interactive hypothesis using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES).

In recent years scholars started exploring new dimensions of the economic vote: patrimony (asset ownership) and positional economic voting. Mushrooming literature in this field finds evidence that both of these dimensions make important contributions to the explanation of voters’ choices. This empirical confirmation may carry a strong “advance democracy bias.” Previous scholarly work has only scratched the surface of studying positional economic voting in other countries. We know little about positional economic voting in Eastern Europe (EE). Whether and to what extent this is happening, remains an open question that needs an empirical investigation. While we remain agnostic, at the outset of the study, we formulate a working hypothesis in favor of positional economic voting. By combining data from nine rounds of the European Social Survey (ESS) and five modules of Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), the study tests these propositions and seeks to identify which factors contribute to positional voting in the region. We found evidence that some positional voting is happening in EE. This occurs significantly more often for individuals who follow politics. Additionally, the rate of unemployment and fragmentation of the party system contribute to more positional voting in EE.