Choosing Rules for Government: The Institutional Preferences of Early Socialist Parties

Penadés, Alberto

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511611414.009

Cited by 10 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…In some countries, where either the socialists did not mobilize a strong electoral support or where the old parties where able to coordinate a single political front against them, the majoritarian system survived. This dominant view has been partially challenged on different accounts, for instance by Penadés (2008), pointing out that the socialist parties also played a role in the choice of systems, and that they preferred proportional systems in environments of weak links to the workers' unions and strong risk of communist divergence.…”

Section: Theoretical Background and Quantitative Indexes Employedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Key electoral institutions and rules influencing proportionality and partisan bias in Spanish politics

Pavía

Toboso

2021

Panoeconomicus

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The current paper focuses on the Spanish electoral rules governing political competition for the central "Congreso de los Diputados". It is well-documented that the system as a whole has traditionally favoured one or the other of the two main political parties (PP and PSOE) at the expense of proportionality and the remaining political parties. This paper focuses on some key Spanish electoral rules and investigates how much the observed biases could be altered by introducing some alternative rules taken from the Swedish electoral system, ceteris paribus. Measures of disproportionality are made through the Loosemore-Hanby index and the Gallagher index. The electoral raw data used for our estimations comes from the 2011, 2015 and 2016 last three Spanish general elections. The basic contribution of the paper is an empirical one as it provides a new example that institutions matter for results.

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Section: Theoretical Background and Quantitative Indexes Employedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Key electoral institutions and rules influencing proportionality and partisan bias in Spanish politics

Pavía

Toboso

2021

Panoeconomicus

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“…For instance, the Belgian Socialists are generally considered reformist (e.g. Bartolini, 2000;Penadés, 2008;Kreuzer, 2010). Remarkably, this is also true for the source Ahmed (2013) uses: Marks et al (2009: 630) describe the Belgian Socialists as a case of 'socialist reformism,' comparable to Britain and the Netherlands, but unlike the radical cases such as Germany and Italy.…”

Section: Mysterious Belgiummentioning

confidence: 99%

When dominant parties adopt proportional representation: the mysterious case of Belgium

Emmenegger

Walter

2019

Eur. Pol. Sci. Rev.

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As the first country to introduce proportional representation (PR), Belgium has attracted considerable attention. Yet, we find the existing explanations for the 1899 breakthrough lacking. At the time of reform, the Catholic Party was politically dominant, advantaged by the electoral system, and facing reformist Socialists. Nevertheless, they single-handedly changed the electoral system and lost 26 seats in the first election under PR. We argue that the Catholics had good reasons to adopt PR. Majoritarian rules tend to create high levels of uncertainty because they provide incentives for non-dominant parties to cooperate. Such electoral coalitions are facilitated by multidimensional policy spaces that make electoral coalitions other than between nonsocialist parties possible. PR reduces the effectiveness of cooperation between non-dominant parties, but such certainty comes at a price. In addition, in the presence of dominant parties, divisions over electoral system reform often result in intra-party conflicts that may be more decisive than inter-party conflicts.

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“…Given the coordination properties of those rules (Cox 1997;Duverger 1954), the already established parties had strong incentives to maintain them. Penadés (2008) explores the incentives behind the support of socialist parties for PR. 4 In this article, I focus on the preferences and policy responses of nonsocialist partiés.…”

Section: Structure Of Electoral Markets and Party Interestsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To check the robustness of the theory, Column 5 (in Table 1) summarizes the theoretical expectations by indicating how vulnerable each party was to the entry of a socialist party. When we include socialist parties [coded following Penadés (2008)], the success rates are 76% and 100%, respectively. Otherwise, they are coded as vulnerable (or partly vulnerable if only some of their members faced a direct threat from socialist parties).…”

Section: Robustness Checkmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Electoral Markets, Party Strategies, and Proportional Representation

Boix

2010

Am Polit Sci Rev

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F ollowing Kreuzer's (2010) methodological pleas, I first reflect, at the conceptual level, on the ways in which historical research and political science should be related to each other. I then apply some of those considerations to examine two key "moments" in the theory (and history) of institutional choice that I first presented in Boix (1999): the underlying conditions that shaped the interests of different parties toward proportional representation, and the process through which those interests were translated into actual legislative decisions.

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Choosing Rules for Government: The Institutional Preferences of Early Socialist Parties

Cited by 10 publications

References 26 publications

Key electoral institutions and rules influencing proportionality and partisan bias in Spanish politics

Key electoral institutions and rules influencing proportionality and partisan bias in Spanish politics

When dominant parties adopt proportional representation: the mysterious case of Belgium

Electoral Markets, Party Strategies, and Proportional Representation

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