Electoral volatility and the dynamics of electoral reform

Recent elections in Europe have shown that a context of increasing citizen distrust towards democratic institutions may lead to very high levels of electoral volatility and to the emergence of new parties. On the other hand, institutional reforms are sometimes presented as a solution to citizens’ discontent with political institutions. Focusing on a specific type of political institution ? electoral systems ? the question addressed in this study is whether high levels of electoral volatility may trigger electoral reforms. The article investigates the conditions under which reforms affecting the electoral system’s degree of openness to new parties were enacted in 25 European countries between 1945 and 2012. The findings demonstrate that volatility due to the emergence of new parties is the most powerful explanation to account for the introduction of electoral reforms, particularly those that hinder the entry of new parties into the system.     

Do electoral rules have an effect on electoral behaviour? An impact assessment

Abstract

Electoral democracies worldwide are all organised around elections but the rules under which the elections are organised differ greatly from one country to another. These electoral rules, such as whether voting is compulsory or what electoral system is used, are thought of as strongly affecting voters’ behaviour and the choices they make. If electoral rules indeed shape citizens’ electoral behaviour, the implication is that theories of what explains voters’ choices are country-specific as well. This is in sharp contrast to the idea that theories of electoral behaviour are generalisable. This special issue tackles this question and offers an assessment of the impact of electoral rules on voters’ behaviour, on the one hand, and the generalisability of individual-level theories of voting behaviour, on the other. The collection of papers furthermore offers an important contribution in terms of the kind of electoral rules that are scrutinised, with several papers focusing on the little-investigated phenomenon of preferential voting.     

Proportional representation and attitudes about politics: results from New Zealand

PR systems often are credited with producing more equitable outcomes between political parties and encouraging wider social group representation than majoritarian systems. Theory suggests that this should instill greater trust, efficacy, and faith in the political system. We assume that citizens disadvantaged by majoritarian rules (political minorities) will have a relatively greater shift toward positive attitudes about democracy following a transition from a majoritarian system to proportional representation. We employ panel data from the 1993–1996 New Zealand Election Study (NZES) to test hypotheses about the effects of electoral system change on attitudes about governmental responsiveness, trust in government, and political efficacy. We find that there is a general shift in mass opinion toward more positive attitudes on some measures of efficacy and responsiveness. Political minorities display a greater shift toward feelings of efficacy than other voters.     

Electoral contexts that impede voter coordination

An electorate can effectively coordinate on the viable parties in its district, or a relatively large proportion of its voters may “waste” their votes on parties that fail to obtain office. Avoiding wasted votes can be more or less difficult depending on several characteristics of the electoral context. Unfortunately, many of the features of electoral contexts hypothesized to cause vote wastage have been tested piecemeal on only a handful of (non-random) cases and/or with data inappropriately aggregated to the national, rather than the district, level. Based on results from 2007 districts in 183 lower chamber elections across 21 countries, we find evidence that new electoral rules, the entry of new parties, past electoral volatility, and high district magnitudes are all likely to make coordination a challenge, with entry by new parties having the largest, most consistent effect.     

Competing loyalties in electoral reform: An analysis of the U.S. electoral college

A central tenet in the electoral systems subfield is that parties, when in power and motivated by partisan interest, seek desired outcomes via the strategic adoption of electoral rules. Such a focus, however, omits a key point: electoral rules also distribute power among geographic units. If, within a party, the partisan and geographic interests of some members conflict, then the canonical relationship between partisanship and rule choice may be conditional. The U.S. electoral college provides an opportunity to test for such intra-party variation, because it advantages some states over others and thus makes salient geographic allegiances. Using an original dataset on one reform proposal—the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC)—I find evidence of competing loyalties. Although NPVIC advances furthest when Democrats control state lawmaking, a state's status as a swing—but not as an overrepresented—state weakens the relationship to the point where even Democrats are unlikely to aid NPVIC.     

Public support for electoral reform: The role of electoral system experience

What affects public support for electoral reform? How does experience with different electoral systems affect people's willingness to support electoral reform? Given the salience of changes to election rules even when they are passed via the legislature and the increasing use of referenda as alternative mechanisms for change, these questions are critical to understanding when electoral reform will occur. I argue that experience (specifically, with an electoral system similar to that under consideration) affects public opinion by reducing uncertainty about the likely effects of reform and thus affects support for reform (although the direction of the effect depends on partisan bias). Moreover, I argue that experience is most important in the absence of strong party cues. I leverage subnational electoral system variation in the United Kingdom and find that experience does affect support for reform — negative experiences decrease support for reform. The results have implications for the possibility of electoral reform in the UK and beyond.     

The personal vote and economic reform

Do electoral rules affect the progress of economic reforms? The students of economic reform have examined the effects of inter-party competition, partly shaped by electoral rules, on economic reform, but have neglected the more direct effects of electoral rules, namely the extent to which they encourage the personal vote. More broadly, studies of the effect of electoral rules on economic policy have relied on the simplistic SMD/PR distinction and have neglected features of electoral institutions that affect the level of intra-party competition. Building on the personal vote literature, we argue that electoral institutions that encourage the personal vote are not conducive to reform progress. We provide the first systematic multivariate cross-country test of the implications of the personal vote literature for economic reform in the context of the post-communist countries from 1990 to 2006. We find that, in line with our theory, countries where electoral rules encourage the personal vote are less likely to reform.     

The servant of two masters: Electoral incentives in the Scottish Parliament

Scholars have pointed out the potential impact of different electoral systems on the incentives for representatives to cultivate personal versus party reputations. The mixed-member proportional system (MMP) allows us to examine the effects of electoral systems on legislators’ incentives. Scholars have argued that MMP may be the ‘best of both worlds’; however, MMP may lead to competing demands on list representatives if they are also allowed to run as constituency candidates, as happens in the Scottish Parliament. I show that this leads to different levels of committee activity—which I use as a surrogate for party activity—from constituency Members of Scottish Parliament (MSPs), pure-list MSPs (who are elected via the party list and do not run in constituencies), and dual-candidate list MSPs (list MSPs who also run in constituencies), and that the proximity of elections also affects committee activity for those who run in constituencies.     

How do voters perceive ideological congruence? The effects of winning and losing under different electoral rules

The degree of ideological congruence between citizens and their elected representatives is an important feature of democratic systems of government. A long tradition of literature has examined the ideological linkages between citizens and governments, often drawing attention to the differences (or lack thereof) in congruence across different types of electoral systems. Previous research has largely relied on aggregate-level measures of ideological congruence, such as the ideological distance between the position of the median voter and the government. We turn our attention here to how congruence relationships are perceived by individual voters, and how the perceptions of congruence may vary across electoral system types. This individual-level measure of ideological congruence is important in that individual-level, rather than aggregate-level, congruence has been shown to influence other outcomes such as citizen satisfaction with democratic performance. We expect electoral “winners” – those who voted for a party that entered government – to perceive greater ideological congruence between themselves and the government compared to electoral “losers”. We expect this effect to be stronger in majoritarian systems where political competition takes place primarily between two parties, than in proportional systems where electoral losers are more likely to receive a proportional share of representation. We test these expectations by estimating random-effects regressions of perceived individual-level congruence using data from 54 elections held in 23 democracies included in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). The results provide consistent support for our expectations. Electoral winners in all types of electoral systems perceive greater ideological congruence between themselves and the government, and this effect is stronger in majoritarian systems.     

Electoral losers revisited – How citizens react to defeat at the ballot box

The paper seeks to reconcile insights from winner-loser gap research with mainstream understanding of election legitimacy. The paper acknowledges that winning and losing elections creates differential incentives for citizens to remain supportive of their political system, but it argues that losers nevertheless have enough reasons to remain supportive in absolute terms. Drawing on democratic theory, the paper develops a rationale for why citizens are willing to accept electoral defeat voluntarily, and suggest a new way to conceptualize citizen reactions to election outcomes. It presents findings from a sample of election studies in established democracies to show that winners typically become more supportive whereas losers at minimum retain their level of support from before the election. It concludes that elections, when reasonably well executed, as they most often are in established democracies, build system support rather than undermine it.     

Trading party preferences: the Australian experience of preferential voting

Political parties respond to electoral rules in ways which gain them partisan advantage and enable them to make strategic choices about the use of their electoral support. The alternative vote (AV) and proportional representation by the single transferable vote (STV) provide considerable opportunity for this kind of partisan activity. The ability of the voter under such electoral systems to rank candidates in order of the voter's preference creates a kind of property which can be used by parties, especially minor parties, to influence the behaviour of both candidates and other parties. The paper investigates this aspect of preferential voting systems and the extent to which the context of electoral rules can encourage or discourage a trade in partisan preferences. Elections for the Australian House of Representatives and Senate are used to show how political actors can respond to electoral rules which permit the control and trading of preferences to be developed into a series of sophisticated transactions.     

Not always second order: Subnational elections,national-level vote intentions,and volatility spillovers in a multi-level electoral system

The widespread second-order view on subnational elections leaves little room for the idea that subnational election campaigns matter for national-level electoral preferences. I challenge this perspective and explore the context-conditional role of subnational election campaigns for national-level vote intentions in multi-level systems. Campaigns direct citizens’ attention to the political and economic “fundamentals” that determine their electoral preferences. Subnational election campaigns and the major campaign issues receive nation-wide media coverage. This induces all citizens in a country to evaluate parties at the national level even if they themselves are not eligible to vote in the upcoming subnational election. Thereby, subnational election campaigns may lead to a reduction in the uncertainty of voters’ national-level electoral preferences throughout the country, which is reflected by a decrease in the volatility of national-level vote intentions. I explore weekly vote intention data from Germany (1992–2007) within a conditional volatility model. Subnational elections reduce uncertainty in nation-wide federal-level vote intentions for major parties. However, patterns of incumbency and coalitional shifts moderate this volatility-reducing effect.     

Two strategies for building a personal vote: Personalized representation in the UK and Denmark

Across parliamentary democracies, elected representatives constitute the link between citizens and government. MPs can connect with voters via the party label, or through personalized forms of representation, which is seen to be increasing in importance. However, scholars disagree on what explains variation in MPs' use of personalized representation strategies. In this article, we argue that politicians use different strategies to personalize the link between themselves and citizens: a constituency-oriented and a person-oriented strategy. To test our argument, we develop a new and novel dataset with behavioral measures of personalized representation. Using a content analyses of 698 British and Danish MPs’ personal websites, we demonstrate that the use of personalization strategies is conditional on the incentives MPs face in terms of electoral insecurity, candidate selection procedures, and the electoral context of the system. Our findings show that the level and type of personalized politics vary across political systems and may pose different types of challenges to party democracies.     

Assessing the psychological and mechanical impact of electoral rules: A quasi-experiment

The paper assesses the influence of electoral rules on vote choice and election outcomes using a quasi-experiment conducted during a recent Canadian provincial election. Respondents were invited to vote under three voting systems (first past the post, alternative voting and proportional representation) and to answer a short questionnaire. We examine how the distribution of votes and seats is affected, and we ascertain how much of the total difference is due to psychological and mechanical effects. We find that a PR system would have increased legislative fractionalization by the equivalent of one effective party and that the mechanical effect is much more important than the psychological effect. As for AV, its mechanical and psychological effects act in opposite directions.     

Manipulating electoral laws in Singapore

The literature on electoral authoritarianism has drawn attention to the use of democratic electoral institutions for undemocratic gains. This paper adds to this body of work by showing how a sophisticated hegemonic party in Singapore manipulated its majoritarian electoral system to “manufacture” its legislative supermajority. By measuring the psychological and mechanical effects of the altered electoral system in Singapore, it shows how changes in the rules of the game boosted the incumbent's legislative dominance despite its declining vote shares in the late 1980s. It also offers new evidence to show how electoral manipulation create an uneven playing field with institutional constraints that penalize smaller parties and benefit the ruling, larger party.     

Sowing the seeds of skepticism? Electoral-integrity beliefs among political elites

Elections in many democracies have come under attack “from within”, with political elites challenging the integrity of the electoral process and calling its outcomes into question. Such allegations may delegitimize democratic outcomes and compromise citizens' confidence in elections. Yet aside from their rhetoric, little is known about political elites' electoral-integrity beliefs. This study breaks new ground by investigating how political elites perceive the integrity of elections, and which factors may account for differences in their electoral-integrity beliefs. Using innovative data from the 2021 candidate survey of the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), the empirical analysis shows that political candidates exhibit mostly positive views about the integrity of the electoral procedures and the 2021 election, while being more skeptical about the fairness of the campaign period. Moreover, the findings show that negative campaign experiences, an affiliation with a populist political party, and electoral defeat are important drivers of candidates' skepticism about the integrity of elections. These findings provide novel insights on the nature, background, and diagnostic significance of political elites’ electoral-integrity beliefs in modern democracies.     

Electoral Reform and Party Adaptation: The Introduction of the Single Transferable Vote in Scotland

The 2007 Scottish Local Government Elections saw the first large scale use of the Single Transferable Vote (STV) in a mainland election in Britain. This presented a range of challenges for Scotland's political parties, more familiar with campaigning under first-past-the-post or the Scottish parliament's semi-proportional Additional Member System (AMS). Most crucially, STV meant the parties had to come to terms with multi-member wards and the transferral of votes between parties. Following a short discussion of the results of the STV elections, this article assesses evidence on how the parties adapted to the new electoral system, focussing particularly on candidate and campaign strategies. The article argues that Scotland's parties showed some, but limited, signs of adapting to new electoral conditions. Rather than strategic adjustment, an element of 'hoping for the best' was evident in all parties.     

How electoral reform alters legislative speech: Evidence from the parliament of Victoria,Australia 1992–2017

Does changing single-member district (SMD) systems to proportional representation (PR) systems affect politicians' behavior? Previous studies, which have utilized cross-sectional or temporal variation in electoral systems, fail to estimate their effects. In contrast, we employ a difference-in-differences design and text analysis to estimate the causal effect of an electoral reform on politicians' issue attention. In particular, we estimate the causal effect of the electoral reform in the Parliament of Victoria in Australia, which changed the electoral systems of the Legislative Council from SMD to PR while holding the system of the Legislative Assembly constant. We analyzed a newly collected dataset of legislators' inaugural speeches from 1992 to 2017 using a topic model. The results show the electoral reform increased politicians’ attention to new economic issues but did not decrease attention to local interests such as promoting primary industries.     

Coalition incentives and party bias in Chile

This article revisits the debate over Chile's binomial electoral rules and its consequences and examines how the new electoral system conceived by a democratic congress altered political competition. It utilizes a seat-vote model of multiparty competition to analyze party bias under the binomial rule. This approach differs substantively from prior studies of the Chilean case that focused primarily on the disproportionality of aggregate results. In contrast to earlier analyses, the findings reveal that the allocation of the seats under the binominal resulted in significant party bias benefiting the main parties of the right. This bias, however, was eliminated after the electoral reform. The new rule continues to provide majoritarian benefits to parties receiving larger shares of votes, but this effect is less pronounced than before. It is now easier for small parties to gain seats, which has increased party fragmentation. However, we show that coalition incentives, which were heralded as one of the main advantages of the binomial rule, are also significant under the new rule in use since 2017.