Incomplete information, proportional representation and strategic voting

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.

Debate—Proportional RepresentationPR and Democratic Statecraft Quentin L. Quade (bio) In "Constitutional Choices for New Democracies," Arend Lijphart sets out to describe and evaluate some of the primary institutional alternatives available to new democracies. Lijphart knows that the choice of electoral system is especially important, since it will likely determine whether many or few parties will compete, and whether coalition or single-party governments will result. He also knows that once chosen, the electoral system will be hard to change. Lijphart favors proportional representation (PR), welcomes proliferated parties, and esteems coalitions. I have publicly defended the opposite view. I urge plurality voting in single-member districts, hope and expect that this will encourage a two-party system, and applaud the single-party government that would result.1 How is it that two democrats with similar starting points like Lijphart and myself could come up with such starkly contrasting practical advice for newly emerging democracies? As in real estate, the key is to inspect the premises. Even a brief and selective inspection, as this one must be, will show why our recommendations differ so sharply, and why I think Lijphart's position rests on questionable, even utopian, foundations. Advocates of proportional representation typically describe it as more "fair" and more "just." Lijphart's article says PR produces "consensus" politics, promotes "conciliation and compromise," and is more "representative" than plurality voting. In fact, each of these good words applied to PR begs a question and calls for a rarely given philosophical argument to establish a meaning for "fair," "just," "representative," and so on. No such arguments are presented or even summarized by Lijphart. The only thing certain about PR is that it will tend to re-create society's [End Page 36] divisions and locate them in the legislature. That is its purpose, logic, and result.2 Whether a system that encourages party proliferation is any of the good things its proponents call it—fairer, more just, more representative—depends on a theory of statecraft and democratic form. What is the purpose of the state? Does the adoption of democracy eliminate or even lessen the traditional requirements of state action? In particular, does democratic statecraft have a diminished responsibility to synthesize society's parts, unify and defend its people, or identify and pursue the common good—meaning those values that no particular part of society will ever seek as its own but on which all particular parts depend? Or does democratic politics exist to do all the things states exist for, but to do them in a new way, a responsible and accountable way? If it does, then the first test of fairness, justice, and representation that democratic politics must pass will be the test of excellence in state action. The second and no less important test will be that of accountability. But for Lijphart and his fellow PR advocates, the first question appears to be: how well are society's natural divisions recreated and relocated in the legislature? Where he equates the number of women in legislatures with representation of women's interests, for example, Lijphart uses the term "representation" as identical to recreation. In his uncritical implicit reliance on the "picture theory" of legislative representation, Lijphart writes as if Edmund Burke had never lived. To prove that PR's tendency to re-create divisions and proliferate parties is indeed a good thing, an extended argument is required. It must explain how a political system will be "fair" if it succumbs to the centrifugal pull of interests, how it can advance the general welfare if it "represents" only minute and particular aspects of society, and how a government cobbled together out of postelection splinters by a secretive process of interparty bartering can be considered responsible and accountable. Only by doing this can PR advocates escape the charge of question-begging. Easy Cases and Unfounded Speculations I have suggested that PR advocates generally, and Lijphart in particular, tend to make their work easy by eliding from PR's tendency to re-create societal divisions to an unexamined designation of such recreation as good. Another labor-saving approach, greatly evident in Lijphart's article, is to build the argument for PR on...

Japan's new electoral system may or may not be good for Japanese democracy, but it is almost ideally designed for the study of strategic voting. No other existing electoral system provides political scientists with data on such neatly separated but simultaneous single-member districts (SMD) and proportional representation (PR) votes. Using candidate-level aggregate data, I find strong evidence for strategic voting: Candidates with a good chance of winning receive more SMD than PR votes, and those with little chance of winning receive more PR votes. Strategic voting explains not only the basic pattern but also several exceptions to the rule. In addition, I find that a realistic but relatively inaccurate ex ante prediction of a candidate's probability of victory produces a superior explanatory model than does a perfect ex post prediction calculated from the final electoral results. These results support the hypothesis that voters base their strategic voting calculations on simple cues available to them before the election.

Time Horizons Matter: Coalition Governments, Replacement Risk and the Size of Government in 96 Countries, 1975-2000

Strategic Voting in Two-Party Legislative Elections

The existing literature on ideological congruence has typically looked at congruence immediately after elections when governments are formed. This article goes beyond that comparative static approach by examining changes in citizen-government ideological congruence between two fixed points in time, namely at the beginning and end of government mandates. Building on a veto player approach and dynamics of party competition under majoritarian and proportional representation (PR) electoral systems, the results indicate, first, that government positions are more stable in between elections, as the number of parties and their ideological distance increase in cabinet. Second, it appears that single-party and homogeneous coalition governments decrease ideological congruence between elections under low levels of polarisation, while they increase congruence under very high levels of polarisation. Third, it was found that governments under majoritarian systems slightly decrease congruence between elections while congruence stays stable on average under PR systems. The different levels of party system polarisation across majoritarian and PR electoral systems mostly explain this difference.

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.

The process of formation of electoral expectations in proportional representation systems is analysed in this article. Contrary to Duvergerian or electoral coordination theories, by using survey and in-depth elite interview data from Spain in the 1970s and 1980s, it is shown that strategic voting depends on heuristics (i.e. extrapolations from the previous election) rather than on rational expectations. The main implication is that strategic voting is possible in large districts.

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.

The literature on agendas with sincere and strategic voting represents an important contribution to our understanding of committees, of institutions, and of the opportunities to manipulate outcomes by the manipulation of institutions. That literature, though, imposes an assumption that may be unrealistic in many situations; namely, that everyone knows the preferences of everyone else. In this essay we apply Bayesian equilibrium analysis to show that the properties of agendas that others derive by assuming complete information do not hold necessarily under incomplete information. First, a Condorcet winner need not be selected, even if nearly everyone on the committee most prefers it. Second, the two-step theorem, that any outcome reachable in n voting stages via some amendment agenda is reachable in two stages under sophisticated voting, need not hold. Third, nonbinding votes, such as straw polls, can critically affect final outcomes.

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

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Please check back later for the full article.Narrowly understood, social choice theory is a specialized branch of applied logic and mathematics that analyzes abstract objects called preference aggregation functions, social welfare functions, and social choice functions. But more broadly, social choice theory identifies, analyzes, and evaluates rules that may be used to make collective decisions. So understood, social choice is a subfield of the social sciences that examines what may be called “voting rules” of various sorts. While social choice theory typically assumes a finite set of alternatives over which voter preferences are unrestricted, the spatial model of social choice assumes that policy alternatives can be represented by points in a space of one or more dimensions, and that voters have preferences that are plausibly shaped by this spatial structure.Social choice theory has considerable relevance for the study of legislative (as well as electoral) institutions. The concepts and tools of social choice theory make possible formal descriptions of legislative institutions such as bicameralism, parliamentary voting procedures, effects of decision rules (e.g., supramajority vs. simple majority rule and executive veto rules), sincere vs. strategic voting by legislators, agenda control, and other parliamentary maneuvers. Spatial models of social choice further enrich this analysis and raise additional questions regarding policy stability and change. Spatial models are used increasingly to guide empirical research on legislative institutions and processes.

The 2000 Mexican presidential race culminated in the election of opposition candidate Vicente Fox and the end of seven decades of one-party rule. This book, which traces changes in public opinion and voter preferences over the course of the race, represents the most comprehensive treatment of campaigning and voting behavior in an emerging democracy. It challenges the “modest effects” paradigm of national election campaigns that has dominated scholarly research in the field. Chapters cover authoritarian mobilization of voters, turnout patterns, electoral cleavages, party strategies, television news coverage, candidate debates, negative campaigning, strategic voting, issue-based voting, and the role of the 2000 election in Mexico's political transition. Theoretically-oriented introductory and concluding chapters situate Mexico's 2000 election in the larger context of Mexican politics and of cross-national research on campaigns. Collectively, these contributions provide crucial insights into Mexico's new politics, with important implications for elections in other countries.

Bayes-Nash Equilibria in Generalized Second Price Auctions with Allocative Externalities

Does Local Representation Matter?