How Votes Are Counted

ABSTRACTA classical question of political science is to what extent electoral systems influence voting behaviour. Yet, many of these studies examine how different electoral systems affect the election results in terms of vote distribution across parties. Instead, we investigate how electoral rules affect intra party preference voting. Given the importance of the debate on the personalization of politics, insight into how electoral rules shape intra-party choice is a valuable contribution to the literature. In our study, we focus on the effect of two specific rules: the option to cast a list vote and on a single versus multiple preference votes. The results of experiments conducted in Belgium and the Netherlands show that electoral rules indeed influence voting behaviour with regard to intra party preference voting, although differences exist between the Netherlands and Belgium. Moreover, we find that the option to cast a list vote equally affects votes for the first candidate on the list, as well as lower positioned candidates. This suggests that preference votes might be less preferential than has often been assumed.

This article shows that a pre-election alliance between the ruling coalition parties with different ideological motivations may result in bias toward the large size of government. In equilibrium, the reelected coalition government implements a redistributive policy that is greater than the median voter's preference. The results can explain why the Japanese coalition government, which colludes for winning elections, has frequently implemented more diffuse fiscal policies than the previous single-party government.

We examine equilibrium voting strategies for elections with interested politicians facing uncertainty about voter pReferences. If politicians' utilities are defined over the set of strategies that voters select (instead of being dependent only on the probability of winning an election), equilibrium strategies will diverge (instead of converging to the median voter's pReferences) as long as politicians have different pReferences. We present conditions (i) for political compromise, and (ii) for politicians with different utility functions to merge into parties with complete strategic agreement.

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.

In a large electorate it is natural to consider voters’ preference profiles as frequency distributions over the set of all possible preferences. We assume coherence in voters’ preferences resulting in accumulation of voters preferences. We show that such distributions can be studied via superpositions of simpler so called unimodal distributions. At these, it is shown that all well-known rules choose the mode as the outcome. We provide a set of sufficient conditions for a rule to have this trait of choosing the mode under unimodal distributions. Further we show that Condorcet consistent rules, Borda rule, plurality rule are robust under tail-perturbations of unimodal distributions.

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.

How do electoral rules influence voters? We build on existing research that has examined voter, rather than elite, reactions to electoral rules and implement a field experiment around a switch from single-member plurality rules to multi-member closed-list proportional rules (PR) in Sierra Leone, expanding the study of electoral rules’ influence on voters further into the Global South. We find that exposure to multimember district/PR increased women’s commitment to voting and decreased both men’s and women’s support for particularistic campaign appeals in this context. These results likely flow from voters’ perceptions of whether politicians are accountable to parties or to voters under different systems, rather than from increased party competition, new party entry, a clear switch to programmatic party competition, or increased trust in elections. We discuss the implications for studying electoral rules in clientelistic democracies.

Choosing between Representing Women or Representing Ethnic Groups in Europe? Adding and Subtracting Plurality, Representation, and Democracy

Most elections, public and private in the United States or abroad, provide that to be declared elected, a candidate must receive either more than half of the valid votes cast in the contest (majority) or more votes than any other candidate (plurality). If there are only two candidates, the two rules are the same, but if there are more than two, the rules differ. Under the majority rule, if no candidate receives a majority, a run-off election or some other procedure is required to choose between the two candidates who lead on the first ballot. Since elections are time consuming and popular elections especially are expensive, investigation and comparison of alternatives seems worthwhile. The author has made a modest investigation, both deductive and inductive, having in mind particularly the proposed amendment to the U. S. Constitution providing for the popular election of the President. The rule put forward here and even more the method of analysis are applicable to a broader set of circumstances, however. The proposed Constitutional Amendment in the form in which it passed the House of Representatives in 1970 is interesting because it is a hybrid between the majority and plurality rules. It provides for election by plurality provided that the leading candidate receives more than 40% of the total vote. If no candidate receives more than 40% of the vote, a run-off election is called for. This rule seems reasonable if the leader receives, say, 49% and the runner-up 41% with 10% going to other candidates. It seems less reasonable if the leader receives 41% and the runner-up 40% with 19% to other candidates. An alternative which appeals on grounds of reasonableness and yet is simple is-

Electoral Strategies in Mixed Systems of Representation

This paper explores ethical issues raised by quadratic voting. We compare quadratic voting to majority voting from two ethical perspectives: the perspective of utilitarianism and that of democratic theory. From a utilitarian standpoint, the comparison is ambiguous: if voter preferences are independent of wealth, then quadratic voting outperforms majority voting, but if voter preferences are polarized by wealth, then majority voting may be superior. From the standpoint of democratic theory, we argue that assessments in terms of efficiency are too narrow. Voting institutions and political institutions more generally face a legitimacy requirement. We argue that in the presence of inequalities of wealth, any vote buying mechanism, including quadratic voting, will have a difficult time meeting this requirement.

Opposing candidates for a political office often differ in their professional backgrounds and previous political experience, leading to both real and perceived differences in political capabilities. We analyze a formal model in which candidates with different productivities in two policy areas compete for voters by choosing how much money or effort they would allocate to each area if elected. The model has a unique equilibrium that differs substantially from the standard median voter model. Although candidates compete for the support of a moderate voter type, this cutoff voter differs from the expected median voter. Moreover, no voter type except the cutoff voter is indifferent between the candidates in equilibrium. The model also predicts that candidates respond to changes in the preferences of voters in a very rigid way. From a welfare perspective, candidates are “excessively moderate”: almost certainly, a majority of voters would prefer that the winning candidate focus more on his or her strength.

This work aims to contribute to our knowledge about the circumstances under which personal representation prevails. The main question is whether constituency orientation appears in a country where electoral rules encourage party representation. Previous research has established that electoral systems and member personalization are closely connected: candidate-centred electoral rules enhance personal-, while party-centred systems support party representation. In this sense, representation is perceived on a one-dimensional scale where personal and party representations indicate the two ends of the continuum. However, due to the party-centeredness of the system, the decisions are presumed to come from the party rather than being the result of individual discretion. In this view, party and personal representations are not mutually exclusive, but personal representation might be considered a form of party representation. In party-centred mixed member systems, the existence of the nominal tier leads parties to pursue rather person-oriented party strategies. Thus, the oft-cited causal effect between mixed electoral rules and personalization can be confirmed. However, to unravel the causal mechanism, we have to perceive the link between electoral rules and personal representation as being mediated by central party strategies. In the quest to test the above hypothesis I collect evidence from a case study on Hungary. Hungary serves as a least likely case, where member personalization is not likely to appear. The dissertation follows the neo-institutionalist approach, and establishes the link between electoral rules, member attitudes and behaviour in contemporary Hungary. It recognizes that even under party-centred electoral rules, there are serious motivations to pursue particularistic goals. These motivations can be proxied by different sets of career factors that relate to the past experience as well as the currently held positions of the legislators. The nature of the independent variables will point to three different types of motivations: (i) electoral, (ii) position-related, and (iii) habitual explanations. Personal representation is perceived from three angles. First, both focus and style of representation as the two aspects of members’ roles perceptions are investigated. Second, individual legislators’ personalized campaign strategies are explained by the pre-selected independent variables. Third, parliamentary questioning proxies constituency service carried out by members in representing the interests of their electoral districts. MP-survey data from 2010 is used to measure attitudes and campaign behaviour, while questioning data covers roughly half of the 2010-2014 electoral term, 2.5 years.

Election data represent a precious source of information to study human behavior at a large scale. In proportional elections with open lists, the number of votes received by a candidate, rescaled by the average performance of all competitors in the same party list, has the same distribution regardless of the country and the year of the election. Here we provide the first thorough assessment of this claim. We analyzed election datasets of 15 countries with proportional systems. We confirm that a class of nations with similar election rules fulfill the universality claim. Discrepancies from this trend in other countries with open-lists elections are always associated with peculiar differences in the election rules, which matter more than differences between countries and historical periods. Our analysis shows that the role of parties in the electoral performance of candidates is crucial: alternative scalings not taking into account party affiliations lead to poor results.

In 1994, Bolivia undertook a major constitutional and electoral reform, in which a closed‐list proportional representation (PR) system for the Lower House of the Congress was replaced by a mixed‐member proportional (MMP) system. Article 60 of the reformed constitution establishes that 68 deputies out of a constitutionally fixed number of 130 will be chosen by plurality rule in single‐seat districts, while the remaining 62 will be chosen by party‐list voting according to proportional representation in nine regional multi‐seat districts. This new electoral system establishes seats linkage between the two tiers such that the overall allocation of seats is determined proportionally according to list votes at the level of each multi‐seat district. In analyzing the underlying causes of the electoral reform in 1994, Mayorga first deals with the widely perceived fundamental problems and flaws of the traditional PR system and, second, addresses the main causes leading to the adoption of an MMP system, focusing on the context in which the politics of electoral reform was carried out.