The introduction of a proportional representation system in Japan

In 1982 Japan broke with all precedent and enacted a proportional representation system for the election of part of the Upper House. The motives of the parties were mixed and the new arrangements raised many practical and constitutional problems. Essentially the new law confused the concepts of equality and fairness. However, in the first election under the new system on 26 June 1983 party strengths were very little changed.     

Strategic electoral considerations under proportional representation

Scholars have long assumed that voters do not employ strategic considerations when casting a vote in systems of proportional representation. Either this would not be necessary because few votes were wasted or impossible because the calculations involved would be too difficult to make. This research note examines the latter and concludes that (Dutch) voters are better able to make such calculations than traditionally has been presumed. Under quasi-experimental conditions that involved what can be called coalition preference voting, voters show tendencies to react to strategic considerations when determining their vote preference.     

Adapting to closed-list proportional representation: lessons from Ukraine

This paper examines the implications of Ukraine’s move from a mixed electoral system to one of proportional representation in the 2006 parliamentary elections. In particular, it seeks to understand how the elimination of district contests affected the two major parties’ strategies in selecting candidates. Two strategies are outlined: prioritizing inclusion and prioritizing cohesion. Under the former, parties co-opt unaffiliated district deputies to improve their electoral fortunes despite potential costs to party discipline. The latter involves parties selecting affiliated deputies on the expectation of greater loyalty if elected. The analysis reveals that while the ruling party, Our Ukraine, employed a cautious version of inclusion, its opponent, the Party of Regions, emphasized cohesion. The findings show that “one size does not fit all” when it comes to how parties react to the introduction of list-only systems. Furthermore, given the greater subsequent success of The Party of Regions in gaining office, the results question the degree to which ruling parties benefit electorally from greater inclusion when responding to the advent of more proportional electoral rules.     

Majority representation and legitimacy: Survey-experimental evidence from the European Union

What can policy makers do in day-to-day decision making to strengthen citizens' belief that the political system is legitimate? Much literature has highlighted that the realization of citizens' personal preferences in policy making is an important driver of legitimacy beliefs. We argue that citizens, in addition, also care about whether a policy represents the preferences of the majority of citizens, even if their personal preference diverges from the majority's. Using the case of the European Union (EU) as a system that has recurringly experienced crises of public legitimacy, we conduct a vignette survey experiment in which respondents assess the legitimacy of fictitious EU decisions that vary in how they were taken and whose preferences they represent. Results from original surveys conducted in the five largest EU countries show that the congruence of EU decisions not only with personal opinion but also with different forms of majority opinion significantly strengthens legitimacy beliefs. We also show that the most likely mechanism behind this finding is the application of a ‘consensus heuristic’, by which respondents use majority opinion as a cue to identify legitimate decisions. In contrast, procedural features such as the consultation of interest groups or the inclusiveness of decision making in the institutions have little effect on legitimacy beliefs. These findings suggest that policy makers can address legitimacy deficits by strengthening majority representation, which will have both egotropic and sociotropic effects.     

Plurality versus proportional representation: An analysis of Sicilian elections

The competing merits of plurality and proportional representation have intrigued political economists and political scientists for quite some time. Of primary interest is whether one or the other system is better in serving the interests of the electorate. Since theoreticians are unable to unambiguously determine the answer to this question, the issue must ultimately be decided empirically. We use data from Sicilian elections, where the system was recently altered towards the system of plurality. We are able to demonstrate that the proportional representation system engenders greater information among voters and elicits greater commitment from them than plurality. We are also able to show that in larger towns increased information causes a more dispersed vote under a proportional representation system; further, this result does not hold under plurality. This may have some implications for the size of positional rents reaped by political parties under the two electoral systems.     

The international diffusion of electoral systems: The spread of mechanisms tempering proportional representation across Europe

There is an assumption in much of the electoral engineering literature that domestic episodes of electoral system choice occur in a vacuum, isolated from international influences. Yet this assumption remains largely untested, despite the comparative focus of much of that literature. This article focuses on part of this gap by considering two electoral mechanisms that seek to limit party system fragmentation under proportional representation – low district magnitudes and high electoral thresholds – and shows that the mechanisms have spread across many European countries during the post‐1945 period. Analyses reveal that national legislators are more likely to adopt one of these electoral mechanisms when a large number of peer countries have made similar choices within the last two or three years. This effect is robust to various model specifications and to the inclusion of multiple controls. The article also offers some qualitative evidence from case studies and parliamentary debates.     

Seat biases of apportionment methods for proportional representation

In proportional representation systems, an important issue is whether a given apportionment method favors larger parties at the expense of smaller parties. For an arbitrary number of parties, ordered from largest to smallest by their vote counts, we calculate (apparently for the first time) the expected differences between the seat allocation and the ideal share of seats, separately for each party, as a function of district magnitude, with a particular emphasis on three traditional apportionment methods. These are (i) the quota method with residual fit by greatest remainders, associated with the names of Hamilton and Hare, (ii) the divisor method with standard rounding (Webster, Sainte-Laguë), and (iii) the divisor method with rounding down (Jefferson, Hondt). For the first two methods the seat bias of each party turns out to be practically zero, whence on average no party is advantaged or disadvantaged. On the contrary, the third method exhibits noticeable seat biases in favor of larger parties. The theoretical findings are confirmed via empirical data from the German State of Bavaria, the Swiss Canton Solothurn, and the US House of Representatives.     

Three-party competition in parliamentary democracy with proportional representation

This article studies the long-run dynamics of policy choices, government formations, and voting behavior under a parliamentary constitution and proportional representation. I develop an infinite period game where, in each period, voters participate in a proportional representation election, and three farsighted parties bargain over one-dimensional policy programs and government positions. The model incorporates the interaction between elections and coalition bargaining, which is the essence of politics in most parliamentary systems, as well as a dynamic environment of policymaking: a policy once implemented remains in effect until another replaces it. I find a Markov perfect equilibrium in which (1) there is no majority party in any election; (2) election results converge over time to a stable vote distribution; (3) policy outcomes change over time but eventually stay within a set of three points; (4) minimal winning coalitions and minority governments are formed with positive probability and alternate over time.     

Forecasting proportional representation elections from non-representative expectation surveys

This study tests non-representative expectation surveys as a method for forecasting elections. For dichotomous forecasts of the 2013 German election (e.g., who will be chancellor, which parties will enter parliament), two non-representative citizen samples performed equally well than a benchmark group of experts. For vote-share forecasts, the sample of more knowledgeable and interested citizens performed similar to experts and quantitative models, and outperformed the less informed citizens. Furthermore, both citizen samples outperformed prediction markets but provided less accurate forecasts than representative polls. The results suggest that non-representative surveys can provide a useful low-cost forecasting method, in particular for small-scale elections, where it may not be feasible or cost-effective to use established methods such as representative polls or prediction markets.     

Incumbency advantage and candidate characteristics in open-list proportional representation systems: Evidence from Indonesia

We use evidence from Indonesia's April 2014 legislative elections to study the relationship between incumbency, list position, candidate characteristics, and electoral success in open-list PR systems. Contrary to a recent literature identifying an incumbency disadvantage in other large developing democracies, we identify a consistent personal incumbency advantage in Indonesia. However, we argue that this advantage is mediated by party choices over how incumbents and newcomers are ranked on party lists, a key heuristic for voters in low-information electoral environments such as Indonesia.     

Coping with complexity: Ballot position effects in the Finnish open-list proportional representation system

Many studies show that the order of candidates’ names on the ballot has an effect on voting. Less informed and indifferent voters may simplify the voting process by using the ballot position of candidates as a voting cue. By studying six parliamentary elections in Finland, this study first demonstrates that the relationship between ballot position and preference votes follows a reversed J-shaped curve. Candidates listed early on the ballot win the most preference votes, while candidates listed near the end have an advantage over those listed in the middle. Furthermore, the ballot position effect grows stronger with the complexity of the electoral environment. The ballot position effect increases as the number of candidates on the party list increases, the candidates-to-seats ratio increases and the number of incumbents on the list decreases.     

Coalition government and satisfaction with democracy: An analysis of New Zealand's reaction to proportional representation

Abstract. Following approval of a referendum in 1993, New Zealand replaced its first–past–the–post electoral system with proportional representation (PR). Although support for PR was initially high, less than a third expressed support for the new system a year and a half after its implementation. We examine two explanations for this decline. One theory assumes that dissatisfaction with the new system is the result of a growing alienation with politics, exacerbated by an unpopular coalition government that voters neither expected nor desired. Another theory assumes that evaluations of the new system are mediated by a preference for coalition or single party government. Our results indicate that a preference for single party government, guided primarily by partisan self–interest, has the largest impact. Nevertheless, negative evaluations of the performance of the coalition government helped contribute to a loss in support for PR suggesting that government performance can affect citizen's evaluation of political institutions, particularly when systems undergo radical change.     

From Qualified Majority to Simple Majority: The Effects of the 1992 Change in the Finnish Constitution

This paper analyzes the consequences of the 1992 change in the voting rule in the Finnish Parliament. Before this reform, one third of all Parliament members could delay a law proposal for reconsideration by the Parliament. This rule was abolished in 1992 which meant that the Finnish Parliament finally adopted a simple majority rule to decide on new legislation. The empirical part of this article analyzes the effects of the reform on the parliamentary parties voting power. The voting power of the big parties increased compared to that of the small parties. However, the variation among smaller parties was greater. The biggest losers were medium size parties. Considering the government and the parliament as institutions, the emphasis clearly moved to the government. Considering parties in the government coalitions as a whole (adding up their share in the government and in the Parliament), the picture was quite clear. The opposition lost at least some of its voting power. This change was clearest in the case of the party government model in which the opposition lost its voting power completely.     

Coalition government and satisfaction with democracy: An analysis of New Zealand's reaction to proportional representation

Following approval of a referendum in 1993, New Zealand replaced its first–past–the–post electoral system with proportional representation (PR). Although support for PR was initially high, less than a third expressed support for the new system a year and a half after its implementation. We examine two explanations for this decline. One theory assumes that dissatisfaction with the new system is the result of a growing alienation with politics, exacerbated by an unpopular coalition government that voters neither expected nor desired. Another theory assumes that evaluations of the new system are mediated by a preference for coalition or single party government. Our results indicate that a preference for single party government, guided primarily by partisan self–interest, has the largest impact. Nevertheless, negative evaluations of the performance of the coalition government helped contribute to a loss in support for PR suggesting that government performance can affect citizen's evaluation of political institutions, particularly when systems undergo radical change.     

Ideological congruence over government mandates under majoritarian and proportional representation electoral systems

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.     

多数暴政新解——兼就《马克思主义视域中的“多数暴政”问题分析》一文与王俊拴先生商榷

密尔以自由为逻辑起点,对多数暴政问题展开论述,认为多数暴政是指世袭贵族和商业阶级运用国家制度和公共舆论对知识精英的一种侵害.其理论贡献在于对多数/少数的论述不自觉地区分了社会学意义上的多数/少数与数量上的多数/少数.社会学意义上的多数与少数之分以建立在对经济资源和政治资源的占有和控制基础之上的谈判实力作为衡量标准,其多数即在民主进程中拥有强大谈判实力的人.数量上的多数与少数之分以数量作为衡量标准,仅涉及数量上多寡的对比,其多数是指数量上的多数人. 两者的关系呈现2种可能一是两者具有重叠性;二是两者具有分离性.正确地区分社会学意义上的多数/少数与数量上的多数/少数的意义在于2个方面一是澄清理论上的误解;二是指导具体的政治实践.