Does Local Representation Matter?

Local Candidates and Distributive Politics Under Closed-List Proportional Representation

The relationship between electoral systems and corruption in a large sample of contemporary democratic nations is analysed in this article. Whereas previous studies have shown that closed-list proportional representation is associated with greater (perceived) corruption than open-list PR, it is demonstrated here that this relationship fails to hold once district magnitude is considered. The theory underlying this study draws on work on ‘the personal vote’ that suggests that the incentives to amass resources – and perhaps even to do so illegally – increase with district magnitude in open-list settings but decrease in closed-list contexts. Extending this insight, it is shown that political corruption gets more (less) severe as district magnitude increases under open-list PR (closed-list PR) systems. In addition, once district magnitude exceeds a certain threshold – the estimates here are that this is as low as fifteen – corruption is greater under open lists than closed lists. Only at small district magnitudes (below fifteen) is closed-list PR associated with more corruption, as conventionally held. These results hold for alternative measures of corruption, for different sets of countries analysed, for different measures of district magnitude and regardless of whether the political system is presidential or parliamentary, and of the number of parties.Using an objective measure of corruption in public works contracting, corroborating evidence is also presented from Italian electoral districts. In Italy's open-list environment in the period prior to 1994, larger districts were more susceptible to corruption than smaller ones.

The open-list proportional representation (OLPR) system, as opposed to the closed-list version, allows voters to pick their favourite candidate from the party list while retaining proportionality of the election results. In the Asia & the Pacific region, this system is used in among others: Fiji, Indonesia and Sri Lanka. What are the upsides, downsides and unintended consequences of this system? Follow the lecture and/or read the paper for the answers.

We provide closed-form solutions for measuring electoral closeness of candidates in proportional representation (PR) systems. In contrast to plurality systems, closeness in PR systems cannot be directly inferred from votes. Our measure captures electoral closeness for both open- and closed-list systems and for both main families of seat allocation mechanisms. This unified measure quantifies the vote surplus (shortfall) for elected (nonelected) candidates. It can serve as an assignment variable in regression discontinuity designs or as a measure of electoral competitiveness. For illustration, we estimate the incumbency advantage for the parliaments in Switzerland, Honduras, and Norway.

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.

So closed: Political selection in proportional 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.

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.

A normatively desirable feature of representative government is for the diversity of ideological choices on offer in the party system to reflect the diversity of policy views in the electorate. Building on the work of Ezrow, and relying on Eurobarometer data which suggest that the degree of public opinion diversity is stable over time, the authors analyse how voting systems mediate the diversity of views in parliament, a variable they label party system dispersion. The paper's central question is: to what extent does party system dispersion remain stable over time? Presented are theoretical arguments that party system dispersion will be more stable in countries that feature single‐member district (SMD) voting systems than in proportional representation (PR) systems. Using cross‐national data on 25 countries over 363 elections, the authors present results that support this hypothesis: they find that proportional representation systems are characterised by fluidity in party system dispersion, whereas party system dispersion in SMD countries remains stable from election to election. The implications of the findings are surprising – to the extent that party platforms reflect the diversity of public opinion within an electoral system, the results suggest that SMD systems do a better job at reflecting the diversity of public opinion viewpoints than do PR systems.

LAND REFORM LEGISLATION AND SECURITY OF TENURE IN IRELAND AFTER INDEPENDENCE DAVID SETH JONES I. INTRODUCTION The lack of security of land tenure was a continuing source of grievance among the Irish tenantry during much of the nineteenth century and became a key issue in the struggle for agrarian reform in its later years. Under the various land reforms of this period, security of tenure was gradually established ; first, to a partial degree, through the recognition of tenant right, and then through the creation of tenant ownership under the various Land Purchase Acts. The most important of these was the 1903 Land Act, under which the bulk of the tenantry was able to purchase holdings from the landlords through a purchase advance from the State repayable in annuity installments over 66.5 years. Following passage of the Land Act of 1903, small tenants became all too aware of the inadequacy of their meager holdings and turned their attention to land distribution. It was soon obvious that there was little use in such tenants becoming owners of their land if they could not eke out an adequate subsistence or produce a marketable surplus. This situation especially applied to occupiers of "uneconomic" holdings, commonly called congests, found in large numbers in the western counties. The "uneconomic " holding was originally valued at less than £10 ratable valuation, but was later considered as any holding unable to support a man and his family at a basic level of comfort.1 In addition, landless elements living in the countryside, especially farmers' sons, rural laborers, and evicted tenants, sought to acquire land, so as to secure a better livelihood. As a result, demands arose from different quarters for a program of land distribution, with eager eyes cast especially in the direction of the large tracts of grassLAND REFORM LEGISLATION AND SECURITY OF TENURE 116 1 Under this revised definition of an "uneconomic" holding, no precise official valuation was set, but in practice it was taken as a holding of less than £20 valuation. land used by graziers (large cattle and sheep farmers, also called ranchers). These demands were promoted during the anti-grazier agitation or "ranch war" between 1906 and 1912 and during the period of land seizures from 1917 to 1921.2 It was evident by this time that much more had to be done to distribute land beyond the limited land distribution measures already enacted. When independence was granted to the twenty-six counties and the Irish Free State was formed in 1922 under the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the political situation that prevailed gave added urgency to further land reform. The treaty and the ensuing Civil War had left the twenty-six counties polarized . The anti-treaty faction of Sinn Féin was disaffected, unwilling to recognize the legitimacy of the new state and drawing strong support from the small farmers of the West. For its part, the first post-independence government formed by the Cumann na nGaedheal Party led by William Cosgrave and representing the more conservative pro-treaty faction did not command widespread popular support. That was indicated by the government 's failure to obtain more than 40 percent of first preference votes in low turnouts in the 1922 and 1923 elections (indeed in all subsequent elections during its period of office). With its prospects far from certain, the new government had to move quickly to consolidate its position and secure a measure of legitimacy across the political spectrum.3 Land reform, involving the distribution of land and expediting land purchase, seemed to offer an opportunity to achieve this move, especially since the reform could elicit support from across the community. As a result, a major scheme to distribute land to congests (commonly referred to as the relief of congestion) and to various groups of landless persons was instituted by the Cosgrave Government (together with measures to expedite land purchase) and was continued with even greater vigor by subsequent governments under a series of Land Acts. The process of distribution involved taking land, by compulsory means if necessary, not just from landlords, but also, and controversially, from some of the existing LAND REFORM LEGISLATION AND SECURITY OF TENURE 117 2 D.S...

JON FRAENKEL At first sight, the Pacific Islands seem like a graveyard for institutional determinist theories regarding the impact of electoral systems on party polarisation. Maurice Duverger’s well-known ‘sociological law’ was that first-past-the-post electoral rules tend to deliver two-party systems. Proportional representation (PR) systems were more loosely associated with multi-party settings.2 Yet in the Pacific, first-past-the-post using countries, such as the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea (1975-2002), have developed multipleparty systems. The PR using territories of New Caledonia, French Polynesia and Vanuatu have, at times, veered towards a two-camp polarisation around the issue of independence. Some firstpast-the-post-using democracies, such as Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia, have not witnessed the emergence of any party-based system at all. Neighbouring Kiribati, Nauru and Tuvalu have similar styles of loose and fluctuating parliamentary alliances but no election-oriented political parties, despite the first using a two round electoral system, the second a unique simultaneously tallied preferential voting system, and the third a block voting system in two-member constituencies. Electoral laws would appear to exert negligible sway over Pacific party systems. On closer examination, Duverger’s theory does shed some light on the direction of electoral incentives in some of the Pacific countries, once hedged with the necessary qualifications and confined to appropriate settings. Negative cases, where electoral laws do not bring about the anticipated party structures are not confined to Oceania. India and Canada, for example, have numerous political parties, but use first-past-thepost electoral systems. Guyana uses a list PR system but has a two-party centred system, as did Austria during 1945-1990. Much of the literature has consequently been aimed at heavily revising Duverger’s theories about the impact of electoral laws on party systems, either by emphasising that the critical association is in fact between district magnitude and the number of parties or by specifying the role of intervening variables, such as ethnic heterogeneity or the number of competing ‘issue dimensions’ to the political process.3 It is in situations where a single salient political cleavage (such as Labour/Conservative, or Catholic/Protestant) dominates the political order that distinct electoral laws may work in different directions, encouraging or limiting multi-partyism. In Fiji and New Caledonia, those varying electoral pressures on party systems exerted considerable influence over the success or failure of compacts aimed at mitigating ethnic conflict. In most South Pacific nations, the decolonisation issue did not prove an enduring The contribution of AusAID to this series is acknowledged with appreciation. Discussion Paper 2005/8 State, Society and Governance in Melanesia THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

In recent years, list systems of proportional representation around the world have undergone important electoral reforms. Changes have included the opening of closed lists, guarantees for more demographic variation on ballot lists, the organization of new sub-local elections and the initiation of common lists. Traditional political parties have tended to endorse these reforms, thinking presumably that these reforms would strengthen their positions in the electoral struggle against new contending parties. Meanwhile, scholars have noted that these plans might backfire if instead of strengthening party unity these party-supported reforms enhance the position of individual candidates to the detriment of a given party as a whole. Yet the idea that these types of electoral reforms increase candidate-centred voting has not been tested. Specifically, it is unclear to what extent citizens’ preferential votes are motivated by individual candidate attributes as opposed to party allegiance. Do electoral reforms enhance the relative influence of candidate-based attributes such as gender on voter preferences, thus diminishing the relative influence of party-based attributes such as ballot position? Our analysis of the Belgian district council elections of 2000 and 2006 reveals that although voters may be more inclined to vote for individual candidates they are no less relying on partisan clues.

This work considers how a ruling party in an increasingly authoritarian regime utilizes legislative electoral system changes. It argues that the placement of former district deputies on the list of Russia’s ruling party after the move to a PR-only system reflected an interest in expanding its presence in the countryside as well as the attractiveness of the ruling party to the former district deputies themselves. It submits that both the party’s willingness to place former district deputies on its list and the willingness of the deputies to accept positions should vary by previous party affiliations, yielding predictable patterns in the aggregate. In terms of list ranking, it finds that the ruling party’s district deputies received significantly better placement than previously independent deputies, but not better placement than district deputies who made the list but had competed under a different party label in the previous election.

Problems of PostcommunismFrom Solidarity to Fragmentation Krzysztof Jasiewicz (bio) "The complex political situation in Poland stems from a misguided and ill-designed electoral law." This diagnosis of Poland's political problems came from Zbigniew Brzezinski a few days before the parliamentary elections of 27 October 1991. According to Gazeta wyborcza, Brzezinski told President Lech Walesa that Poland's legislators had made a fundamental error by adopting a system based on proportional representation (PR) for elections to the Sejm (the lower house of Parliament). "This electoral law will disperse the will of the people and will not provide a basis for the emergence of a democratic majority [in the Sejm]," he added.1 Subsequent events seemed to reveal the accuracy of Brzezinski's warnings, as Polish voters elected candidates from some 30 different political parties or groupings to the Sejm; the strongest party controls a mere 62 out of the 460 total seats, and no majority coalition of fewer than five parties is possible. Given these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that it took two months to form a weak, three-party minority government. The crowning irony was that this happened just two years after Solidarity-seemingly a unified, if not homogeneous, political movement-swept the communists virtually out of power in the historic elections of June 1989. Of course, a bad electoral law alone could never explain such a striking turn of events, as Brzezinski well knew. As early as 1990, a deep split had begun to appear in Solidarity, which had never been perfectly united in the first place. From its sudden emergence in the summer of 1980, Solidarity was a multidimensional phenomenon: a trade [End Page 55] union struggling to protect the interests of all employees (not merely manual workers); a social movement striving to vindicate civil and human rights; and a political movement seeking democracy and national independence. As such, Solidarity attracted individuals of an enormously wide range of social, economic, and political persuasions. They had almost nothing in common except their belief that Poland's government should be made accountable to the Polish people and a commitment to pursuing this goal by nonviolent means only. As early as the fall of 1981, even this minimal consensus seemed as if it might fade away. Solidarity's first congress yielded no agreement on economic issues, while "fundamentalists" quarreled with "pragmatists" and the public began to show the first signs of disillusionment. Diverse political groupings were starting to develop their own distinct identities and agendas under Solidarity's protective umbrella when the regime struck back with its declaration of martial law on 13 December 1981. Paradoxically, martial law saved Solidarity. Most Poles, too hobbled by passivity or conformism to undertake clandestine activities, looked to Solidarity throughout the 1980s as the symbol of all those hopes that the regime was trying to crush. Meanwhile, the Solidarity underground managed to achieve a remarkable unity, sustained by the constant threat of being wiped away by the regime, by memories of the 1980-81 glory days, and by the leadership of Lech Walesa. Thus Solidarity was able to enter the Roundtable talks of 1989 as a cohesive group with nothing to lose and everything to win. At the Roundtable it secured the regime's agreement to a "contract" calling for semi-free parliamentary elections in June 1989 in which Solidarity candidates could run for 35 percent of the seats in the Sejm and all 100 seats in the newly reestablished Senate. Solidarity won all but one of the seats it contested. It ran an official "all-Solidarity team," with a small committee of Walesa's associates handpicking a candidate or slate of candidates for each contested constituency. This strategy alienated some prominent Solidarity leaders, who saw it as the sort of undemocratic maneuver best left to the communists. Some dissenters even decided to run against official Solidarity candidates, but none were successful. Although people voted in droves for the Solidarity candidates, it is important to remember that these were mainly protest votes, ballots cast less for Solidarity than against communist rule. Moreover, neither in this election nor in any subsequent election did Solidarity gain the support of a majority of the Polish...

We introduce incomplete information to a multiparty election under proportional representation: each voter knows her preferences and votes strategically to maximize her payoffs, but is uncertain about the number and the preferences of the other voters. Parties are assumed to be purely office motivated and, hence, the resulting governments are always minimum winning. In this framework, we prove (a) generic existence of equilibria where only two parties receive a positive fraction of the votes and therefore lead to single-party governments and (b) generic inexistence of equilibria that lead to coalition governments. That is, contrary to common wisdom, a proportional rule is found not to promote sincere voting and to be favorable towards single-party governments. The existence of two-party equilibria that lead to single-party governments is robust to parties having ideological concerns.