Looking for Locals: Voter Information Demands and Personal Vote-Earning Attributes of Legislators under Proportional Representation

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506

Almost all legislators are subordinate to party leadership within their assemblies. Institutional factors shape whether, and to what degree, legislators are also subject to pressure from other principals whose demands may conflict with those of party leaders. This article presents a set of hypotheses on the nature of competing pressures driven by formal political institutions and tests the hypotheses against a new dataset of legislative votes from across 19 different countries. Voting unity is lower where legislators are elected under rules that provide for intraparty competition than where party lists are closed, marginally lower in federal than unitary systems, and the effects on party unity of being in government differ in parliamentary versus presidential systems. In the former, governing parties are more unified than the opposition, win more, and suffer fewer losses due to disunity. In systems with elected presidents, governing parties experience no such boosts in floor unity, and their legislative losses are more apt to result from cross-voting.

Section: Hypotheses: Legislative Parties and Competing Principalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Competing Principals, Political Institutions, and Party Unity in Legislative Voting

Carey

2007

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506

“…District‐specific efforts by legislators (Heitshusen et al. ) and the effectiveness of personal‐vote attributes in getting elected (Shugart, Valdini, and Suominen ) were shown under multimember districts as well . It is not the case, these studies show, that representatives from one district serve their party supporters residing in another district as much as they serve their own voters.…”

Section: Unequal Voters? a New Look At Parliamentary Representationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are Voters Equal under Proportional Representation?

Kedar

Harsgor

Sheinerman

2015

We develop and apply a new conceptual framework and measure for evaluating electoral systems, focusing on (in)equality in parliamentary representation. Our main arena of interest is proportional representation with districts, an electoral system employed by more than half of democratic states, and we draw on an almost entirely overlooked fact: Electoral regimes vary substantially within countries, with some voters casting their ballot in semi-majoritarian districts of few representatives and others in large and proportional ones. This within-country institutional variation, we contend, affects representational (in)equality. Evaluating equality in parliamentary representation, we demonstrate that districted proportional representation often leads to overrepresentation of voters supporting right-leaning parties. Utilizing district-level data from 20 Western parliamentary democracies and complementing our within-country approach with a cross-country analysis, we further show that where parliaments are elected by large and small districts, representational inequality among voters is greater compared with countries in which parliament is elected by even-magnitude districts.

“…Note that the “personal vote” also can matter in proportional systems that use open lists (see Shugart, Valdini, and Suominen ), and the causal effect of incumbency is debatable (see Fenno ; Zaller ).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Timeline of Elections: A Comparative Perspective

Jennings

Wlezien

2015

How do voter preferences come into focus over the electoral cycle in different countries? Do they evolve in patterned ways? Does the evolution vary across countries? This article addresses these issues. We consider differences in political institutions and how they might impact voter preferences over the course of the election cycle. We then outline an empirical analysis relating support for parties or candidates in pre-election polls to their final vote. The analysis relies on over 26,000 vote intention polls in 45 countries since 1942, covering 312 discrete electoral cycles. Our results indicate that early polls contain substantial information about the final result but that they become increasingly informative over the election cycle. Although the degree to which this is true varies across countries in important and understandable ways given differences in political institutions, the pattern is strikingly general.