This study aims to investigate the decline of Islamic parties in post-Suharto Indonesia and its correlation with changes in the electoral system. Using a mixed method, data on the post-Suharto ...election was analyzed quantitatively using the Pedersen formula, supplemented with a qualitative review of scholarly sources, such as journals, books, and proceedings. The results showed that the changing electoral system triggered dynamics in the party system, leading to a decline in the number of votes for incumbent parties, particularly Islamic parties. This decline led to electoral volatility, where voters were more willing to switch their support from one party to another. Moreover, the decline of Islamic partiess’ electoral performance prevailed, as they could not reclaim their positions. This study offers insight into the workings of political party systems in developing democracies, showing how modifications to the electoral process can influence the political environment. These results add to the growing body of knowledge on party systems and electoral politics, not only in Indonesia but also in comparable contexts around the globe.
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.
Corruption has become one of the most extraordinary phenomena that occur in various democratic countries, including in Indonesia, so that it makes Indonesia ranked 96th in the world as one of the ...most corrupt countries, and the most dominated by legislative institutions whose members are elected through electoral system. The purpose of this study is to analyze the relationship and corruption factors of the Central Tapanuli legislature by using qualitative research methods with a type of descriptive analysis research and using electoral system theory, legislative corruption and types of political corruption. The results in this study that general election focused on people (people centered) makes political costs very expensive, also makes the attitude of patron-client between the regional head and members of the legislature, and raises a practical political attitude in society and the politicians of Central Tapanuli
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.
Religion and Election in Nigeria Eric Chinenye Aneke
Nsukka Journal of Religion and Cultural Studies,
09/2023, Volume:
11, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Nigeria is socio-culturally multi-ethnic and religiously pluralistic. Religion has been a very singular but very strong factor that is affecting negatively the electoral system in Nigeria. The ...following key terms were used in this study: religion, election, politics, political party, electoral system, and franchise/suffrage. Political aspirants would always make use of their religious affiliations to achieve cheap political popularity. The electorates tend to vote for a given political aspirants based on religious sentiments and not on verifiable objective good human attributes. The aim of this paper among others is to attempt to find out whether religious affiliations of the political spirants enhance or hinder their successes during general election in Nigeria. The study is qualitative in character. It interviewed a cross-section of Nigerians and also made use of secondary sources of information such as library books, journal articles, newspapers, magazines, etc. The study is very significant in a good number of ways including that it makes the electorates to cast their votes based on good quality political aspirants rather than on sentiments. The findings of the paper, among others, include the fact that the electorates in Nigeria generally cast their votes in line with their religious affiliations. It is recommended, among others, that the electorates should not cast their votes during general election on the basis of religious affiliations but rather on verifiable and objective good quality human behaviour.
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.
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