Patterns of Personal Vote Seeking in Mixed Electoral Systems: The Politics of Retrenchment in German Defence Policy

Zittel, Thomas

doi:10.1080/00344893.2014.902217

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 24 publications

(17 reference statements)

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“…By default, they rather function as arenas for partisan conflict. Consequentially, in parliamentary systems, it might be governments rather than committees that function as sources of particularistic policies (Suiter and O’Malley, 2014; Zittel, 2014).…”

Section: Political Parties and The Process Of Assigning Committee Seats In The Bundestagmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…6 The distinct strategies of German parties that we theoretically substantiated above can be further clarified in light of a related and crucial observable implication. This concerns the frequent practice of dual candidacy that stresses the fact that nominally elected legislators have no monopoly on geographic representation (Saalfeld, 2005) and that parties consciously aim to link the incentives resulting from the proportional tier with the plurality tier (Lundberg, 2006;Schweitzer, 1979;Zittel, 2014;Zittel and Gschwend, 2008). In the 2005 federal election, for example, 1050 candidates (45%) ran in both a nominal district and on the party list.…”

Section: Committee Assignments Under Mmp Rulesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Who brings home the pork? Parties and the role of localness in committee assignments in mixed-member proportional systems

Gschwend

Zittel

2016

Party Politics

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The assignment of seats to specialized standing committees is a most consequential choice in legislative contexts. Distributive theories of legislative organization suggest that electoral incentives to cultivate personal votes result in the self-selection of legislators to committees best suited to please their constituents and, thus, to secure reelection. However, these theories discard the partisan basis of European parliaments and therefore fail to adequately assess the politics of committee assignments in these particular contexts. This article aims to explore the significance of distributive theories for the German case in differentiated ways and on the basis of a new and rich data set including statistical data for five legislative terms (1983, 1987, 1998, 2005, and 2009). It argues that in partisan assemblies, political parties might develop an interest in distributive politics themselves and might assign distinct types of legislators to distinct committees to seek personal votes contingent upon distinct electoral incentives. Particularly, we argue that Germany’s mixed proportional system provides incentives to parties to assign legislators with profound local roots to district committees best suited to please geographic constituents.

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Section: Political Parties and The Process Of Assigning Committee Seats In The Bundestagmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Committee Assignments Under Mmp Rulesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who brings home the pork? Parties and the role of localness in committee assignments in mixed-member proportional systems

Gschwend

Zittel

2016

Party Politics

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“…Hence, from the perspective of a district, it is attractive to have more (list) representatives in Berlin. Indeed, the only existing empirical analysis that studies the effect of the number of MPs per district finds that districts with more MPs were more likely to be spared from the cutback of military facilities in the early 2010s (Zittel 2014). I thus hypothesise: Hypothesis 3: The more representatives a district has, the better it is represented substantively.…”

Section: Effects On Substantive Representationmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…After all, few political decisions target specific districts. A rare example is Zittel (2014), who studies the change in military personnel stationed in each district due to a Bundeswehr reform decided in 2011. Zittel's unit of analysis is the individual MP, not the district.…”

Section: Voting Behaviourmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Unequal Geographic Representation in a Mixed-Member Electoral System: Evidence from the German Bundestag

Haffert¹

2021

German Politics

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This paper demonstrates a systematic geographic bias in the German mixedmember electoral system. This bias concerns the composition of the individual party groups, and, by extension, the composition of the parliament: The Bundestag is much more urban than it would be under equal geographic representation. The bias is caused by the distribution of list seats across districts: since parties have incentives to give the best list positions to candidates from their strongest districts, regions where the vote is more fragmented systematically get more representatives. Since the vote is more fragmented in urban districts, these districts have more MPs than rural districts. The paper empirically analyses Bundestag elections between 1994 and 2017 and demonstrates that geographic disproportionality has increased strongly with the growing fragmentation of the German party system. This affects substantive representation in terms of leadership positions and voting behaviour in the Bundestag. Unequal representation in the German political system therefore also has a geographic component.

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Erststimmen generierende Merkmale der Direktkandidaten bei Bundestagswahlen

2017

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Patterns of Personal Vote Seeking in Mixed Electoral Systems: The Politics of Retrenchment in German Defence Policy

Cited by 4 publications

References 24 publications

Who brings home the pork? Parties and the role of localness in committee assignments in mixed-member proportional systems

Who brings home the pork? Parties and the role of localness in committee assignments in mixed-member proportional systems

Unequal Geographic Representation in a Mixed-Member Electoral System: Evidence from the German Bundestag

Erststimmen generierende Merkmale der Direktkandidaten bei Bundestagswahlen

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