Institutional determinants of the largest seat share

The degree of predominance of the largest party in a representative assembly affects government formation and survival. The seat share of the largest party, in turn, is constrained by the interaction of assembly size and electoral district magnitude in the following way. When all S seats in an assembly are allocated in districts of magnitude M, a logical quantitative model proposes that the largest fractional share is s₁ = (MS)^−1/8. As a curve, the model is found to fit with R² = 0.509, considering data from the averages of 46 periods in 37 countries, during which the electoral rules were essentially steady. As a worldwide average, the expression s₁(MS)^1/8 = 1 holds within 1%. Deviations from this average express the impact of various country-specific political and socio-cultural factors that can be investigated once the basic institutional constraints are controlled-for. This means that the degree of largest party predominance may be engineered to hover around a desired average by adjusting assembly size, and district magnitude, while keeping country-specific factors in mind.     

Insincere voting under the successive procedure

Most European parliaments use the successive procedure to reach decisions. This means that a parliament votes feasible alternatives one-by-one in a pre-determined order until one of them obtains a majority of votes. The paper has two objectives. First, I sketch a simple method making it easy to uncover instances of successful insincere voting under the successive procedure. Second, by focusing on data from one national assembly consistently using this procedure, I demonstrate that insincere or strategic voting is very rare. The finding does not indicate that politicians necessarily behave in a non-strategic or unsophisticated manner. It means only that strategic maneuvers may take place at earlier stages of the decision-making process, for example, in designing the voting agenda.     

From processing to analysing: Intensifying the use of microcomputers in development bureaucracies

This article examines constraints in development bureaucracies in intensifying the use of microcomputers as they move beyond processing applications to analysing applications. The work is based on the experience of several ministries of the Government of Kenya. Processing applications involve throughput of data and are relatively simple. Analysing applications, in contrast, are more complex and include data assembly, sensitivity analysis, and modelling. The article argues that processing applications are more compatible with the administrative cultures, bureaucratic functions, personnel skill levels and organizational structures of development bureaucracies. Analysing applications are less compatible because they require a level of training and motivation uncommon in development bureaucracies. Analysing applications are further thwarted by constraints in the supply of relevant information and the lack of demand for analysis by decision-makers. A four-cell matrix is developed which explains these constraints. The article concludes with several recommendations for encouraging microcomputer-based analysis, but cautions that processing applications will continue to dominate for the foreseeable future.     

The Declining Value of Revolving-Door Lobbyists: Evidence from the American States

‘‘Revolving-door” lobbyists are individuals who transition from governmental positions into lobbying for private entities. Such lobbyists thrive on the insider connections and political knowledge that they developed while in government. These assets afford former lawmakers more access to and influence over incumbent lawmakers. The value of their connections and knowledge, however, is contingent on former colleagues remaining within the legislature. As new legislators enter the assembly, the connections and knowledge of former members expire and lose value. Whereas increases in turnover or assembly size generate more former lawmakers who might lobby, such increases negatively affect former members’ value as lobbyists. Interest groups accordingly hire fewer former legislators to lobby. Other factors, such as longer cooling-off periods or increased legislative staff resources, produce slight or no substantive effects on rates of revolving. Legislative characteristics mostly determine rates of revolving for former lawmakers.     

The 1998 Northern Ireland Assembly Election

The result of the assembly election in Northern Ireland in June 1998 was a victory for those who support the assembly, but it was not such a triumph for David Trimble and the Ulster Unionist Party. I will examine both the Unionist vote and the Nationalist vote and the consequences.     

Lobbying with conflicting interests: Norwegian local-central relations

Abstract.  The costly lobbying model of Potters and van Winden is confronted with data on lobbying interactions between local assemblies and the national assembly in Norway. A total of 239 interactions are studied. Survey responses by a large number of voters and politicians, as well as registry data on fiscal standing, demographics and elections are utilised. Two of the main predictions of the costly lobbying model gain support in the data. The probability of obtaining substantial discretionary funding from the central level increases: with decreasing conflict of interest between local and central politicians; and with the lobbying cost incurred by local politicians. For a given conflict and cost, however, the rate of lobbying success depends crucially on structural characteristics of the municipality. In particular, the success rate is significantly higher for poor municipalities located in national electoral districts with many seats per voter than for rich municipalities located in districts with few seats per voter.     

Endogenous Parties in an Assembly

In this article, I show how members of an assembly form voting blocs strategically to coordinate their votes and affect the policy outcome chosen by the assembly. In a repeated voting game, permanent voting blocs form in equilibrium. These permanent voting blocs act as endogenous political parties that exercise party discipline. In a stylized assembly I prove that the equilibrium parties must be two small polarized voting blocs, one at each side of the ideological divide.     

Testing the Impact of Political Generations: The Class of 94 and Pro‐feminist Ideas in the Swedish Riksdag

How can one explain the transformation of elected assemblies like national parliaments? In this study it is argued that much can be gained from taking the assumption of political generations more seriously when trying to explain transformations of the political agenda – for example, of themes and topics brought up in the parliamentary process. More specifically, the article expands on previous research in three ways: first, it launches the concept of ‘parliamentary political generation’ where the core element is the combination of an influx of large numbers of newcomers into the elected assembly and an electoral context that is formative – that is, that exhibits characteristics that distinguish the election from other elections. Second, an empirical test is conducted where other factors such as party affiliation and social background characteristics are controlled for. Finally, the test on the impact of parliamentary political generations is conducted in a context – the Swedish Riksdag – where parliamentary party groups are strong. The data used is the Parliamentary Surveys 1985–2010 conducted at the Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. The political generation in focus is the ‘Class of 94’. The results show that the Class of 94 distinguish themselves by being more feminist than their senior colleagues and other groups of newcomers in Swedish elections. This is the feminist generation in Swedish politics.     

Voting for development? Ruling coalitions and literacy in India

Across the world, governments skew the distribution of state resources for political gain. But does such politicisation of resource allocation affect development trajectories in the long run? We focus on the long-term effects of voting for the ruling coalition on primary education in India. Using a close-election instrumental variable design and drawing on a new socio-economic dataset of India's state assembly constituencies in 1971 and 2001, we examine whether areas represented by members of ruling coalitions experienced greater increases in literacy over 30 years. We find no evidence of this being the case, in the overall data or in relevant sub-samples. The null results are precisely estimated, and are consistent across OLS and 2SLS specifications and several robustness checks. These findings suggest the politicised distribution of some funds in the short run does not affect long-term development trajectories.     

Delegate interactions at the 1984 national party conventions: The Tennessee delegations

This study compares the activities of the Democratic and Republican delegations from Tennessee to the 1984 national nominating conventions. Although the two delegations were quite similar in personal attributes, their activities varied contextually with the different circumstances surrounding the two conventions. While the Democratic convention was a genuinely decision-making assembly making for wide dispersion of delegation members' activities, the Republican convention turned the delegates into recipients of party appeals for unified support of the presidential as well as congressional and gubernatorial candidates. The decision of the Republicans to conduct their 1988 convention under the same rules as in 1984, in contrast to the Democrats' decision to have a commission create new rules for 1988, was inevitable given the different contexts of the two conventions.     

Local Government and Welfare Generosity: Municipality Spending on Social Welfare

Although it is difficult for local governments to give support for social welfare recipients top political priority, there are huge variations in the support recipients actually receive among Norwegian municipalities. However, local governments representing different party ideologies may prefer to support different dimensions of generosity. Some municipalities could have a liberal attitude to eligibility rules but be strict on time limits and the amount of money provided. Others may be generous regarding time limits or amounts received once one is accepted as a welfare client. Data from the mid 1990s indicate the variation in support is related to different generosity dimensions for different party groups. While the total number of clients seems unrelated to politics and basically correlates with local social problems, the duration and amount of support are related to the political composition of the municipality assembly. Devoid of any large variation, both time limits and the amount of support increase in accordance with socialist leanings, and the total budget used for social welfare support also increases with the proportion of women in the municipality assembly.     

中国特色社会主义是中华民族伟大复兴的必由之路

中国三次“伟大革命”理论，是胡锦涛同志在庆祝改革开放30周年纪念大会的报告中提出的。第一次伟大革命是辛亥革命；第二次伟大革命是指新民主主义革命和社会主义革命；第三次伟大革命是以改革开放为特征的新的“伟大革命”。以往，我国学界注重讨论的跨越“卡夫丁峡谷”理论，是为中国特色社会主义探寻唯物史观的理论根据。现在，我们上溯到鸦片战争时期，从历史的宏阔视野，继续探讨跨越“卡夫丁峡谷”理论，对我们坚持中国特色社会主义道路、促进中华民族伟大复兴具有重要的现实意义。     

The impact of campaign expenditures on political competition in the French legislative elections of 1993

We use regression analysis to estimate the effect that campaign money had on the votes of challengers and incumbents in the 1993 elections to the French legislative assembly. Incumbent candidates can at best expect to win 1.01% of the popular vote for each extra franc they spend per registered voter in their district. Challengers can expect to win at least twice as much as this. Simulations show that if campaign spending ceilings were halved, incumbents would have gained an extra ten percent of the popular vote over their closest challenging rivals. The regression analysis also suggests that voters react negatively to candidates who rely heavily on their own money for their outlays and reward candidates who rely on contributions from private individuals. These results suggest that campaign spending ceilings may inhibit political competition, and that voters may resist a candidate who relies on narrow sources of funding.     

The Seat Product Model of the effective number of parties: A case for applied political science

This paper extends Taagepera's (2007) Seat Product Model and shows that the effective number of seat-wining parties and vote winning parties can both be predicted with institutional variables alone, namely district magnitude, assembly size, and upper-tier seat share. The expected coefficients are remarkably stable across different samples. Including the further information of ethnic diversity in the models hardly improves the estimate of the effective number of parties, and thus the institutions-only models are preferable on the grounds of parsimony and the applicability to electoral-system design or “engineering”.     

India after the 2014 general elections: BJP dominance and the crisis of the third party system

ABSTRACT

This article critically assesses claims that India has entered a new party system after the 2014 general elections, marked by renationalisation with the BJP as the new ‘dominant’ party.’ To assess these claims, we examine the electoral rise of the BJP in the build-up to and since the 2014 general elections until the state assembly elections in December 2018. Overall, we argue that despite the emerging dominance of the BJP, a core feature of the third party system -a system of binodal interactions- has remained largely intact albeit in a somewhat weaker form. Furthermore, by comparing the post 2014 Indian party system with key electoral features of the first three party systems, we conclude that the rise of the BJP has thrown the third-party system into crisis, but does not yet define the consolidation of a new party system.     

International Best Practice and the Constitution,Democracy and Rights Commission

The UK government has pledged to establish a Constitution, Democracy and Rights Commission. This body will have a wide remit to recommend potentially sweeping constitutional change. This article draws on international experience and best practice to outline how the commission might best organise the process to produce proposals which are widely supported, fit for purpose, and durable. We argue that to achieve these goals the commission’s organisation should reflect three key principles: impartiality, expertise, and public participation. This would reflect international best practice and build on recent domestic developments. We argue that these principles can best be achieved if the commission works through a citizens’ assembly that combines members of the public with party politicians. This would be a new departure for the UK, but a necessary one given the scale of the government’s constitutional reform agenda, and its stated goal of restoring public trust in politics.     

Leader Survival,Revolutions, and the Nature of Government Finance

Leaders face multiple threats to their political survival. In addition to surviving the threats to tenure from within the existing political systems, which is modeled using Bueno de Mesquita and colleagues' (2003) selectorate theory, leaders risk being deposed through revolutions and coups. To ameliorate the threat of revolution, leaders can either increase public goods provisions to buy off potential revolutionaries or contract the provision of those public goods, such as freedom of assembly, transparency, and free press, which enable revolutionaries to coordinate. Which response a leader chooses depends upon existing institutions and the structure of government finances. These factors also affect the likelihood and direction of institutional change. Tests of leader survival indicate that revolutionary threats increase the likelihood of deposition for nondemocratic leaders. Leaders with access to resources such as foreign aid or natural resource rents are best equipped to survive these threats and avoid the occurrence of these threats in the first place.     

Politics, Economics and the Measurement of Power

To what extent is political power fundamentally different from or, alternatively, comparable to economic power? While it is true that the basic institutions of democratic political life - the electoral arena and the sovereign representative assembly - differ from such capitalist economic institutions as the market and the joint-stock company, the logic of the power game which takes place in both settings is quite similar. In both institutions power will be a function of the capacity to enter decisive coalitions with other players: individuals, political parties, stockholders or groups of stockholders. Power indices may therefore be employed in order to reveal aspects of the strategic gaming that takes place both in representative assemblies and at yearly stockholders' meetings. This article discusses and compares various quantitative measures of voting power in the two kinds of voting bodies.     

Las Madres De Chihuahua: Maternal Activism,Public Disclosure,and the Politics of Visibility

Women simultaneously occupy a space of both strength and vulnerability in Mexico. While existing institutions, traditions, and gender norms create the conditions whereby feminicide and forced disappearances proliferate, responses to these events prominently feature maternal calls for justice. How do the victims’ mothers counter extreme gender violence in Ciudad Juárez? Existing accounts of maternal politics typically fall into three wide categories: celebratory accounts, critical approaches, and the theatrical dimension of maternal politics. While these accounts provide important insights into the political power of maternal politics, they do not adequately explain its pedagogical function. Bringing to bear the insights of Judith Butler’s performative theory of public assembly and Rita Laura Segato’s anthropology of violence, this article suggests that maternal politics transforms private experiences of extreme gender violence into political expressions of strength and agency to politically beget what Segato defines as counter pedagogies of cruelty.     

Proportional representation: An empirical evaluation of single-stage,non-ranked voting procedures

Rapoport, Felsenthal and Maoz (1988) have proposed three alternative methods to discern the fair proportion of seats that a party in a representative assembly ought to receive as a function of voters' preference orderings. All three methods assume that the ratio between the number of voters preferring party i over j to the number of voters preferring party j over i can be tested for consistency, and, if sufficiently consistent, can be appropriately scaled to discover the proportion of seats each party ought to receive. Using these methods as standards, we use exit-poll data gathered during the 1985 elections to the general convention of the Israeli General Federation of Labor (Histadrut) to examine the extent to which plurality- and approval-voting procedures provide a fair allocation of seats. The findings indicate that: (a) all three methods yield sufficiently consistent matrices of preference ratios; (b) the plurality- and the approval-voting procedures yielded significantly different proportional representations; (c) the proposed proportion of seats according to the three aggregation methods fall midway between the proportion of seats that the plurality and the approval procedures allocate. We discuss practical implications of these findings. Requests for reprints should be sent to: Professor Amnon Rapoport, Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina, Davie Hall 013A, Chapel Hill, NC 27514.