2014
DOI: 10.1017/s0022381613001394
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The Adoption of Proportional Representation

Abstract: The debate between economic and political explanations of the adoption of proportional representation (PR) has yielded mixed results. We reexamine this debate and argue that one has to take the different levels on which the causal mechanisms are located into account. This leads to a novel reformulation of Rokkan's hypotheses: we claim that PR is introduced when legislators face strong district-level competition and when their parties expect to gain seats from a change of the electoral law. In the empirical par… Show more

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Cited by 58 publications
(60 citation statements)
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References 22 publications
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“…Table 3 provide a more controlled look at how the socialist electoral threat affected Conservative and Liberal MPs. It shows that a one standard deviation increase in the local socialist threat that a member faced insignificantly reduced his or her probability of supporting postponement and significantly increased his or her probability of supporting reform Proposals B and E. These results are consistent with the MP-level patterns for the case of Germany investigated in earlier work by Leemann and Mares (2014). Collectively, these MP-level results from the Norwegian case provide empirical support for the logic of our party-building account of why incumbent legislators in the bourgeois parties opted to switch to PR, as well as additional support for the well-established socialist threat hypothesis.…”
Section: Individual Mps' Seat-maximizing Incentivessupporting
confidence: 87%
See 1 more Smart Citation
“…Table 3 provide a more controlled look at how the socialist electoral threat affected Conservative and Liberal MPs. It shows that a one standard deviation increase in the local socialist threat that a member faced insignificantly reduced his or her probability of supporting postponement and significantly increased his or her probability of supporting reform Proposals B and E. These results are consistent with the MP-level patterns for the case of Germany investigated in earlier work by Leemann and Mares (2014). Collectively, these MP-level results from the Norwegian case provide empirical support for the logic of our party-building account of why incumbent legislators in the bourgeois parties opted to switch to PR, as well as additional support for the well-established socialist threat hypothesis.…”
Section: Individual Mps' Seat-maximizing Incentivessupporting
confidence: 87%
“…Following Leemann and Mares (2014), we argue that intraparty variation in support for PR among backbenchers can be explained partly by members' differing exposures to socialist electoral threats in their own local districts.…”
mentioning
confidence: 97%
“…These findings align with arguments that elected leaders seek electoral institutions that will put or keep them in power (e.g. Benoit and Hayden 2004;Colomer 2005;Leemann and Mares 2014). They also mesh with the findings of Bowler, Donovan, and Karp (2006), who, in a survey of politicians in Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, and New Zealand, find that politicians that came to power under compulsory (as in Australia) or voluntary (as in the other three countries) rules are most likely to favor the institutional status quo.…”
Section: What Causes Compulsory Voting?supporting
confidence: 79%
“…5 Because some research has documented nonlinearity in the relationship between ethnic diversity and party system fragmentation (Raymond 2015 One concern with estimating the effects of electoral systems on party system fragmentation is the possibility the choice of electoral systems is endogenous (e.g. Boix 1999;Colomer 2005;Leeman and Mares 2014). The most relevant concern here is that electoral systems are determined by the social structure-that countries employing more proportional electoral systems do so because their social structures are more diverse (Lundell 2010: 32-40;Rokkan 1970).…”
Section: =1mentioning
confidence: 99%