Demography and Democracy: A Global, District-level Analysis of Electoral Contestation

Abstract

A ccording to the classical perspective, polity size and democracy are inversely related. In this article, we argue that there is an important exception that manifests itself at the district level in settings where multiparty competition is allowed. Specifically, we find that larger districts encourage greater contestation. This results from a little-noticed mechanical effect as well as from several features of constituencies that are affected by size and have direct repercussions for contestation. To demonstrate this thesis we assembled a unique dataset, the Multi-level Election Archive (MLEA), which unites electoral contests across a variety of districts (national, regional, and local) and elective offices from the eighteenth century to the present, including a total of 88 countries, 2,344 elections, 79,658 districts, and more than 400,000 contests. With this evidence we were able to conduct a broad array of statistical tests, some global and others focused on particular countries or election types, all of which support our general argument. E lectoral contestation may be defined as the degree of election-based competition in a political unit. Where contestation is minimal there is little organized opposition, and the incumbent party captures most of the votes and seats. Where contestation flourishes there are more competitors than available seats, a tight race for votes and seats, and frequent turnover in control. Contestation implies ex ante electoral uncertainty. 1 So understood, contestation is integral to the electoral (aka elite, minimal, procedural, or realist) conception of democracy, in which democracy is achieved through competition among leadership groups vying for the electorate's approval during periodic elections (

Size and democracy revisited – Vom Einfluss der Kreisgröße auf das Wählerverhalten in Deutschland

“…Der Einfluss der Größe politisch-administrativer Einheiten auf den politischen Wettbewerb wurde in der Vergangenheit wenig berücksichtigt und fast ausschließlich im Kontext von Wahlkreiszuschnitten diskutiert (Gelman und King 1994). In größeren Kreisen wächst der politische Wettbewerb, was aus Sicht der WählerInnen prozedural ebenso wie substanziell wünschenswert sein kann (Gerring et al 2015). In größeren Gebieten ist es zudem unwahrscheinlicher, dass lokale Eliten die Kontrolle über einen großen Teil der Wähler ausüben, somit wird der "Stimmenkauf" teurer und damit wird es günstiger, sich für Kollektivgüter einzusetzen und sich auf diese Weise eine Wählerbasis zu sichern.…”

Causes of party conflicts in local politics

“…Many scholars have tried to establish what causes party conflicts in elected assemblies. Some studies find that the political situation in the parliamentary arena is linked to diversity and social fragmentation in a society (Aistrup, 2004; Koetzle, 1998; Sullivan, 1973), to the size of the democratic unit (Bäck, 2000; Gerring et al, 2015; Karlsson, 2013), to fiscal stress (Lantto, 2005), or that the presence of a protest party may be a sign of societal conflict which the established parties have failed to channel (Erlingsson, 2005). And a raft of studies also suggests that political contestation fuels political conflicts (Adams and Merrill, 2009; Adams et al, 2004; Downs, 1957; Ezrow et al, 2011; Schumacher et al, 2013).…”

Measuring the Competitiveness of Elections

“…While all three recently proposed measures rest on explicit calculations about how votes translate into seats, each relies on implicit assumptions about how effort maps into votes (and how costly effort is). Whether PR contests in MMDs are judged more or less competitive than single-member plurality 2 Even simpler aggregate measures use 100 minus the largest party's vote share to capture "competition," with obvious limitations (e.g., Gerring et al, 2015). Other approaches focus on aggregate volatility in electoral behavior (i.e., party-switching) at the voter level (e.g., Wagner, 2017).…”