After decades of scholarship, there is still little agreement about the usefulness of territorial self-governance in managing territory-centred conflicts. We argue that the effectiveness of ...territorial self-governance as a tool of territory-centred conflict management increases when combined with a proportional representation (PR) electoral system for the national legislature in basically open political regimes, but not when combined with a parliamentary form of government at the centre. We propose that the combination of territorial self-governance and PR in at least minimally democratic regimes has most conflict-reducing potential, as both institutions follow a logic of widening the input side of representative politics. We find empirical support for this proposition using binary time-series cross-section analysis. Our findings highlight the need to consider not just the number but, more importantly, the type of power-sharing institutions that are combined with each other when looking for ways to reduce the risk of territory-centred intrastate violence.
This article analyses the impact of electoral institutions on the re-election campaigning and outreach strategies of Members of the European Parliament on the Twitter social media platform. Social ...media offers politicians a means to contact voters remotely and at low cost. We test the effect of diverse national proportional representation electoral institutions in European elections on a possible online electoral connection. We draw upon an original dataset of Members of the European Parliament Twitter activity before, during, and after the 2014 European elections. Our results confirm that variation in electoral institutions leads to meaningful differentiation in representatives' social media campaigning, which is further affected by national party, voter and legislator characteristics. Representatives make constructive use of Twitter, but there is no sustained online electoral connection.
Electoral systems in which voters can cast preference votes for individual candidates within a party list are increasingly popular. To the best of our knowledge, there is no research on whether and ...how the scale used to evaluate candidates can affect electoral behavior and results. In this paper, we analyze data from an original voting experiment leveraging real-life political preferences and embedded in a nationally representative online survey in Austria. We show that the scale used by voters to evaluate candidates makes differences. For example, the possibility to give up to two points advantages male candidates because male voters are more likely to give ‘zero points’ to female candidates. Yet this pattern does not exist in the system in which voters can give positive and negative points because male voters seem reluctant to actively withdraw points from female candidates. We thus encourage constitution makers to think carefully about the design of preference voting.
This article compares the relationship between candidate age and political selection on the local and national level of politics. On which level are young candidates more likely to be selected by ...parties and elected by voters? Using register data from Finland, covering over 100,000 candidates from 2011 to 2021, we test two competing hypotheses: the “stepping stone” hypothesis relating to the traditional pipeline theory of political representation, and the “parachute” hypothesis, which represents a non-hierarchical approach to political careers. Our findings provide slightly more support for the latter hypothesis. While national elections are more competitive, comparatively more young candidates are running in these contests. We also find that the electoral disadvantage for young candidates is slightly larger in municipal than in national elections. Based on election survey data, we show that is this due to age affinity effects within the electorate, where senior voters’ candidate preferences have greater weight.
The features of electoral systems affect electoral outcomes even for fixed societal preferences. We analyze a quasi-experiment around a change in voting technology that reduces the cost of ...split-ticket voting. We find that the reform increases split-ticket voting, has no impact on vote shares in executive races, and benefits small parties in multiple-seat races, resulting in higher political fragmentation. This suggests that voters prioritize executive races and that, when the costs to split the ticket are large, straight-ticket voting is incentivized and decisions on the executive race drive decisions on other races. In particular, strategic voting on the single-seat race has spillovers to races with a proportional representation system, where strategic incentives are less prominent. The reform reduces the costs of disassociating executive from legislative races and allows voters to more easily express their preferences.
Growing evidence reveals that candidate issue engagement differs between men and women. However, recent research suggests that individual-level differences among candidates should be small under the ...strategic incentives inherent in single-member district elections that encourage party rather than personal-vote seeking. We examine whether men and women candidates emphasize different issues in their electoral campaigns and if the magnitude of the gender gap varies under different electoral rules. Our analysis of 7497 Japanese election manifestos spanning more than 20 years, from 1986 to 2009, reveals significant gender differences in the issues candidates emphasize in their electoral campaigns, regardless of party affiliation or other attributes. Moreover, these differences remain salient after an extensive change from a multi-member district to single-member district electoral system.
Abstract
When do candidate-centred electoral systems produce undisciplined parties? In this article, we examine party discipline under open-list proportional representation, a system associated with ...MPs cultivating personal constituencies. We present a model explaining how legislators’ preferences and support among voters mediate political leaders’ ability to enforce discipline. We show that disloyalty in candidate-centred systems depends on parties’ costs for enforcing discipline, but only conditional on MP preferences. MPs who share the policy preferences of their leaders will be loyal even when the leaders cannot discipline them. To test the model’s implications, we use data on legislative voting in Poland’s parliament. Our empirical findings confirm that disloyalty is conditioned on party leaders’ enforcement capacity and MP preferences. We find that legislators who contribute more to the party electorally in terms of votes are more disloyal, but only if their preferences diverge from the leadership. Our results suggest that the relationship between open lists and party disloyalty is conditional on the context of the party system.
In 2019, Sāmoa's parliament amended the Constitution to redefine the constituencies of Sāmoa. At least some aspects of these amendments are unconstitutional and should be declared void. This article ...traces the nature of Sāmoa's constituencies over time, from the arrangements made prior to independence to the changes implemented for the 2021 election. It shows how Sāmoa's constituencies originally reflected a hybrid electoral system that combined Indigenous customary institutions with the state institutions of Westminster-style parliamentary government. However, with the 2019 amendments, the definition of constituencies has moved away from membership based on family and village connections to residence in a particular place, diminishing hybridity and centralizing authority in state institutions. The result is a shift, not only in the physical boundaries of constituencies, but in the constitutional understandings of membership and belonging that underpin political citizenship in Sāmoa.
The purpose of this article is to substantiate the key elements of public administration design of party and electoral systems development, namely, legislative, financial and ...communication technologies. The paper proves that qualitative, manageable, change in young democracy must inevitably be designed at the state level. Party and electoral systems are not only subject to spontaneous development, but can also be purposefully developed based on the goals and objectives of public administration. The key research issue in this paper is to identify factors that can hinder the processes of development and institutionalization of party and electoral systems in the Russian Federation. Theoretical basis of the study was formed by D. P. Quintal, G. Sartori, R. Taagepera, M. S. Shugart, K. Benoit and E. Laszlo. The application of political theories helped to prove the relevance of studying the party system as an important part of the political sphere, as well as to demonstrate the importance of the selected public engineering elements. The review of the practice of electoral and party institutes in the Russian Federation, based on theoretical analysis, helped to understand what are the features of state public engineering in this area. On the basis of the theoretical analysis, a number of conclusions were made about the validity of certain measures of state influence on the party and electoral systems. The public engineering for last half a century has gained special value from the point of view of development of political system as a whole and electoral system in particular. In the strategic plan, the public engineering of the development of the party and electoral system should be based on working with young people as a projective object of public management. The main factors that potentially have a negative impact on the development and institutionalization of party and electoral systems include the following: (1) the absence of a systematic approach to changes in legislation; (2) the absence of a comprehensive system of feedback from the electorate, which leads to sustainable absentism and may harm the very system of public engineering of party and electoral systems; (3) the unresolved problem of content management in the campaigns of political parties, as a result of which most campaigns are based on the promotion of leaders known to all, which is poorly aligned with the demand of young people for new political actors; (4) the lack of a comprehensive system of feedback from the electorate.
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