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Electoral Reform And The Fate Of New Democracies
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Book Synopsis The Limits of Electoral Reform by : Shaun Bowler
Download or read book The Limits of Electoral Reform written by Shaun Bowler and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-03-28 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Institutions 'matter' to electoral reform advocates and political scientists - both argue that variation in electoral institutions affect how elected officials and citizens behave. Change the rules, and citizen engagement with politics can be renewed. Yet a look at the record of electoral reform reveals a string of disappointments. This book examines a variety of reforms, including campaign finance, direct democracy, legislative term limits, and changes to the electoral system itself. This study finds electoral reforms have limited, and in many cases, no effects. Despite reform advocates' claims, and contrary to the 'institutions matter' literature, findings here suggest there are hard limits to effects of electoral reform. The explanations for this are threefold. The first is political. Reformers exaggerate claims about transformative effects of new electoral rules, yet their goal may simply be to maximize their partisan advantage. The second is empirical. Cross-sectional comparative research demonstrates that variation in electoral institutions corresponds with different patterns of political attitudes and behaviour. But this method cannot assess what happens when rules are changed. Using examples from the US, UK, New Zealand, Australia, and elsewhere this book examines attitudes and behaviour across time where rules were changed. Results do not match expectations from the institutional literature. Third is a point of logic. There is an inflated sense of the effects of institutions generally, and of electoral institutions in particular. Given the larger social and economic forces at play, it is unrealistic to expect that changes in electoral arrangements will have substantial effects on political engagement or on how people view politics and politicians. Institutional reform is an almost constant part of the political agenda in democratic societies. Someone, somewhere, always has a proposal not just to change the workings of the system but to reform it. The book is about how and why such reforms disappoint. Comparative Politics is a series for students, teachers, and researchers of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu. The Comparative Politics series is edited by Professor David M. Farrell, School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin, and Kenneth Carty, Professor of Political Science, University of British Columbia.
Book Synopsis The Politics of Electoral Reform by : Alan Renwick
Download or read book The Politics of Electoral Reform written by Alan Renwick and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-04 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elections lie at the heart of democracy, and this book seeks to understand how the rules governing those elections are chosen. Drawing on both broad comparisons and detailed case studies, it focuses upon the electoral rules that govern what sorts of preferences voters can express and how votes translate into seats in a legislature. Through detailed examination of electoral reform politics in four countries (France, Italy, Japan, and New Zealand), Alan Renwick shows how major electoral system changes in established democracies occur through two contrasting types of reform process. Renwick rejects the simple view that electoral systems always straightforwardly reflect the interests of the politicians in power. Politicians' motivations are complex; politicians are sometimes unable to pursue reforms they want; occasionally, they are forced to accept reforms they oppose. The Politics of Electoral Reform shows how voters and reform activists can have real power over electoral reform.
Book Synopsis Understanding Electoral Reform by : Reuven Y. Hazan
Download or read book Understanding Electoral Reform written by Reuven Y. Hazan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The field of elections and electoral systems, and particularly electoral reform, has exhibited tremendous growth and cross-national appeal over the last two decades. However, beyond an increased knowledge of voting rules and their consequences for political representation, little attention has been devoted to the question of why electoral systems have recently undergone substantial change in several liberal democracies. This book addresses several new approaches to electoral reform. First, the scope of the study of electoral reform has been expanded. Second, contrary to previous studies of electoral reform, the conviction that the determinants of reform can be explained by one single approach has been replaced by a belief in a more comprehensive framework for analysis. Third, we move beyond political parties (acting in parliament and government) as the most significant source of electoral reform. Fourth, a focus on the determinants of electoral reform allows us to include motivations and objectives of electoral reform. A final advancement in the study of electoral reform is the inclusion of countries other than ‘established’ democracies. This book was published as a special issue of West European Politics.
Book Synopsis Defining Democracy by : Daniel O. Prosterman
Download or read book Defining Democracy written by Daniel O. Prosterman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-02-14 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defining Democracy reveals the history of a little-known experiment in urban democracy begun in New York City during the Great Depression and abolished amid the early Cold War. For a decade, New Yorkers utilized a new voting system that produced the most diverse legislatures in the city's history and challenged the American two-party structure. Daniel O. Prosterman examines struggles over electoral reform in New York City to clarify our understanding of democracy's evolution in the United States and the world.
Book Synopsis Electoral Reform and the Fate of New Democracies by : Sarah Shair-Rosenfield
Download or read book Electoral Reform and the Fate of New Democracies written by Sarah Shair-Rosenfield and published by Weiser Center for Emerging Dem. This book was released on 2019 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How elites influenced major electoral reform in the emerging democracy of Indonesia
Book Synopsis The Handbook of Electoral System Choice by : J. Colomer
Download or read book The Handbook of Electoral System Choice written by J. Colomer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The topic of electoral reform is an extremely timely one. The accelerated expansion of the number of new democracies in the world generates increasing demand for advice on the choice of electoral rules; at the same time, a new reformism in well established democracies seeks new formulae favouring both more representative institutions and more accountable rulers. The Handbook of Electoral System Choice addresses the theoretical and comparative issues of electoral reform in relation to democratization, political strategies in established democracies and the relative performance of different electoral systems. Case studies on virtually every major democracy or democratizing country in the world are included.
Download or read book Smarter Ballots written by J.S. Maloy and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-06-08 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a new democratic theory of election reform, using the tradition of political realism to interrogate and synthesize findings from global elections research and voting theory. In a world of democratic deficits and uncivil societies, political researchers and reformers should prioritize creating smarter ballots before smarter voters. Many democracies’ electoral systems impose a dilemma of disempowerment which traps voters between the twin dangers of vote-splitting and “lesser evil” choices, restricting individual expression while degrading systemic accountability. The application of innovative conceptual tools to comparative empirical analysis and previous experimental results reveals that ballot structure is crucial, but often overlooked, in sustaining this dilemma. Multi-mark ballot structures can resolve the dilemma of disempowerment by allowing voters to rank or grade multiple parties or candidates per contest, thereby furnishing democratic citizens with a broader array of options, finer tools of expression, and stronger powers of accountability. Innovative proposals for ranking and grading ballots in both multi-winner and single-winner contests, including referendums, are offered to provoke further experimentation and reform—a process that may help the cause of democratic elections’ relevance and survival.
Book Synopsis To Keep or To Change First Past The Post? by : André Blais
Download or read book To Keep or To Change First Past The Post? written by André Blais and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-05-08 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First past the post is one of the oldest and simplest electoral systems. The logic is simple: the candidate with the most votes wins. It is the system in place in some of the oldest democracies, most especially the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as the largest democracy, India. This is also a system that is hotly debated, and proposals for reform are often advanced. This book addresses the following questions: What fosters or hinders reform of first past the post? When and why does reform emerge on the political agenda? Who proposes and who opposes reform? When and why do reform proposals succeed or fail? What kind of proposal tends to be put on the table? Are some types of proposal more likely to succeed? Why? The first chapter undertakes a comparative analysis of the conditions under which reform is initiated. The following chapters investigate in detail the politics of electoral reform in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and New Zealand, the debates that take place, the proposals that are advanced, and the strategies deployed by the actors. These analyses contribute to a rich and nuanced understanding of why first past the post is often challenged and sometimes replaced.
Book Synopsis Making Democracy Safe by : Megan Reif
Download or read book Making Democracy Safe written by Megan Reif and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethnic grievances, socio-economic cleavages, past conflicts, and other macro-level factors associated frequently with political violence cannot explain subnational and cross-national variation in geographic and temporal patterns of coercive campaigning and post-election violence. Why do so many democracies -- old and new, diverse and homogenous -- experience election violence, often long after founding elections? Why does it occur in some electoral districts and not others? I develop a common set of explanations for this unique form of political violence, proposing why, where, how, and when parties and candidates risk reprisals, punishment, and reputational costs to influence elections through “undue influence.” Considering the array of available non-coercive strategies, such as negative campaigning, vote buying, and boycotting available to politicians, to name a few, the choice to use violence or to allow supporters to do so is a rare and, often, conscious choice. I aim to expand understanding of this phenomenon. First, drawing on historical case studies of particularly acute eruptions of election violence, I describe the enigmatic historical and contemporary patterns of election violence that contemporary explanations, which focus primarily on recent episodes, tend to overlook. It is study of these cases, as well as preliminary, theory-building research trips to observe both rounds of Indonesia's 2004 presidential elections, on which I base my theory, while the collection of data and tests of this theory will be carried out independently and separately from this presentation of theory, hypotheses, and empirical expectations to minimize bias and report transparently and honestly when the empirical results are inconsistent with my initial propositions. While the theory shaped the research design and data collection, data has not been analyzed before full articulation of the theory in its current form. I begin by developing a typology of election violence -- an undertaking that responds to one of the first studies in political science to call attention to the topic (Rapoport & Weinberg, 2001b, p. 35). I follow by presenting a theory to explain the probability, spatial diffusion, typological variation, lethality, and long-term rise and fall of election violence in the electoral histories of many polities. In the first of four propositions, I contend that parties and candidates are most likely to initiate or tolerate election violence when both uncertainty and incentives to cultivate a personal vote are high. Electoral uncertainty arises from exogenous sources of competitiveness. Institutional uncertainty arises following pro-democratic electoral reforms or tougher monitoring and enforcement of electoral corruption laws, increasing the costs of nonviolent fraud relative to violence. Personal vote incentives (a) minimize party desire and ability to control candidate campaign behavior and (b) maximize the number of actors willing to provide violence when faced with the imminent gain or loss of the private benefits that particular candidates target to loyal supporters. Second, I argue that the timing, targets, perpetrators, number of people involved, and other components of the typology vary across electoral system families and regime type. At one extreme, in Closed List Proportional Representation Systems (CLPR), violence occurs primarily during the intra-party, pre-campaign and/or coalition-formation stages of competition and involves candidate sponsorship of violence against one another. At the other extreme, violence in First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) electoral systems occurs primarily during the inter-party campaign and election day phases, targeting voters and supporters. Following the posting of results, post-election violence tends to occur when the national distribution of competitive constituencies is such that at least one party and its supporters estimated apriori equal probabilities of winning or losing the ability to govern alone at the national level, a situation that can occur in both CLPR and FPTP systems. This and other types of violence tend to occur at adolescent stages of democratization, rather than primarily during founding elections. Third, I suggest that ethnic grievances, socio-economic cleavages, past conflicts, and other correlates of deaths common in the broader political violence literature cannot predict when and where election violence occurs. I hypothesize instead that these predisposing factors determine the severity and lethality to which coercive campaigning and election violence escalate in particular countries and constituencies. Fourth, I propose that election violence is endogenous to democratization. Cleaning up elections can, in the short term, increase incentives for competitors to engage in coercive campaigning and election violence. In turn, eruptions of election coercion can disrupt path-dependent, institutionalized electoral bias and fraud more by generating mass awareness of and demand for pro-democratic electoral reforms than can nonviolent election fraud alone. The theory's subnational and cross-national empirical expectations will be evaluated using three original datasets, informed by qualitative fieldwork in Algeria, Newark, and Pakistan. The Election Violence Incidents Database (EVID) includes narratives and micro-level coding of the features of election-related incidents reported in major national newspapers four months before and one month after elections in Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, Newark, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Variables include dates, geographic location (latitude-longitude), perpetrator and victim affiliations, and positions, the tactics used by each actor in each event (from vandalism to bombings), deaths, injuries, property damage, and electoral consequences, as well as an index of report reliability indicators. EVID encompasses elections since the 1960s, but initial analysis will include only two elections for each case. The cross-national analysis employs the Global Violent Elections Database (GVED), which indicates whether each national election worldwide between 1890 and 2005 included violence, fraud, or both, along with number of injuries and deaths (for 1945-2005). I combine this data with that compiled by other scholars for uncertainty, ICPV, electoral systems, degree of democracy, electoral reform, and control variables such as ethno-linguistic diversity and poverty. Due to the lack of literature and measurement of causes of electoral reform, it is difficult to implement a dynamic model that addresses the mutually causal relationship between election violence and electoral reform. For a tentative test of the endogeneity hypothesis, I will use data on the timing of major electoral reforms and constitutional changes in neighboring countries during the previous five years as an instrument for electoral reform in a structural equation model. I created the Election Laws on Election Crimes (ELECD) database, which codes national election crimes laws current as of 2005 (if specified in the constitution or electoral law and amendments) for nearly all countries in the world. I model the content, complexity, and levels of fines, penalties, electoral remedies for violent and nonviolent electoral crimes as a function of a country's past experience with election violence. In describing and explaining election violence and its institutional consequences, I contribute to research on micro-level variations in violence, the role of violence as a mechanism of institutional change, and the incremental process by which even flawed elections further democratization. My findings should interest practitioners involved in election observation, reform, administration, and security, as well as those involved in designing institutions in new democracies.
Book Synopsis From Open Secrets to Secret Voting by : Isabela Mares
Download or read book From Open Secrets to Secret Voting written by Isabela Mares and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-17 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The expansion of suffrage and the introduction of elections are momentous political changes that represent only the first steps in the process of democratization. In the absence of institutions that protect the electoral autonomy of voters against a range of actors who seek to influence voting decisions, political rights can be just hollow promises. This book examines the adoption of electoral reforms that protected the autonomy of voters during elections and sought to minimize undue electoral influences over decisions made at the ballot box. Empirically, it focuses on the adoption of reforms protecting electoral secrecy in Imperial Germany during the period between 1870 and 1912. Empirically, the book provides a micro-historical analysis of the democratization of electoral practices, by showing how changes in district level economic and political conditions contributed to the formation of an encompassing political coalition supporting the adoption of electoral reforms.
Book Synopsis When Citizens Decide by : Patrick Fournier
Download or read book When Citizens Decide written by Patrick Fournier and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-09 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three unprecedented large-scale democratic experiments have recently taken place. Citizen assemblies on electoral reform were conducted in British Columbia, the Netherlands, and Ontario. Groups of randomly selected ordinary citizens were asked to independently design the next electoral system. In each case, the participants spent almost an entire year learning about electoral systems, consulting the public, deliberating, debating, and ultimately deciding what specific institution should be adopted. When Citizens Decide uses these unique cases to examine claims about citizens' capacity for democratic deliberation and active engagement in policy-making. It offers empirical insight into numerous debates and provides answers to a series of key questions: 1) Are ordinary citizens able to decide about a complex issue? Are their decisions reasonable? 2) Who takes part in such proceedings? Are they dominated by people dissatisfied by the status quo? 3) Do some citizens play a more prominent role than others? Are decisions driven by the most vocal or most informed members? 4) Did the participants decide by themselves? Were they influenced by staff, political parties, interest groups, or the public hearings? 5) Does participation in a deliberative process foster citizenship? Did participants become more trusting, tolerant, open-minded, civic-minded, interested in politics, and active in politics? 6) How do the other political actors react? Can the electorate accept policy proposals made by a group of ordinary citizens? The analyses rely upon various types of evidence about both the inner workings of the assemblies and the reactions toward them outside: multi-wave panel surveys of assembly members, content analysis of newspaper coverage, and public opinion survey data. The lessons drawn from this research are relevant to those interested in political participation, public opinion, deliberation, public policy, and democracy. Comparative Politics is a series for students, teachers, and researchers of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.essex.ac.uk/ecpr. The Comparative Politics Series is edited by Professor David M. Farrell, School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin, Kenneth Carty, Professor of Political Science, University of British Columbia, and Professor Dirk Berg-Schlosser, Institute of Political Science, Philipps University, Marburg.
Book Synopsis Democracy in the States by : Bruce E. Cain
Download or read book Democracy in the States written by Bruce E. Cain and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democracy in the States offers a 21st century agenda for election reform in America based on lessons learned in the fifty states. Combining accessibility and rigor, leading scholars of U.S. politics and elections examine the impact of reforms intended to increase the integrity, fairness, and responsiveness of the electoral system. While some of these reforms focus on election administration, which has been the subject of much controversy since the 2000 presidential election, others seek more broadly to increase political participation and improve representation. For example, Paul Gronke (Reed College) and his colleagues study the relationship between early voting and turnout. Barry Burden (University of Wisconsin–Madison) examines the hurdles that third-party candidates must clear to get on the ballot in different states. Michael McDonald (George Mason University) analyzes the leading strategies for redistricting reform. And Todd Donovan (Western Washington University) focuses on how the spread of "safe" legislative seats affects both representation and participation. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously observed that "a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country." Nowhere is this function more essential than in the sphere of election reform, as this important book shows.
Download or read book Demeny Voting written by Fouad Sabry and published by One Billion Knowledgeable. This book was released on 2024-09-12 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover the Future of Democratic Governance with Demeny Voting Are you eager to advance democratic systems and explore innovative political reforms? Demeny Voting introduces a transformative concept in political science, offering insights into a groundbreaking electoral reform designed to enhance fairness and inclusivity. This book is essential for professionals, students, and enthusiasts seeking a deeper understanding of modern democracy. Chapter Brief Overviews: 1. Demeny Voting - Learn the principles, origins, and transformative potential of Demeny Voting. 2. Democracy - Explore core democratic principles and their role in innovative voting methods. 3. Suffrage - Review the evolution of voting rights and their impact on current frameworks. 4. Universal Suffrage - Understand universal suffrage’s role in equitable voting rights and its implications for Demeny Voting. 5. Compulsory Voting - Examine the pros and cons of compulsory voting and its interaction with Demeny Voting. 6. Voting Age - Investigate debates on voting age and Demeny Voting’s approach to youth engagement. 7. Proxy Voting - Discover proxy voting mechanisms and their potential integration with Demeny Voting. 8. Weighted Voting - Learn how weighted voting systems relate to Demeny Voting principles. 9. Liquid Democracy - Explore liquid democracy and its synergy with Demeny Voting for participatory governance. 10. Collaborative E-Democracy - Investigate how technology and collaborative e-democracy complement Demeny Voting. 11. Noocracy - Delve into governance by knowledge and expertise in relation to Demeny Voting. 12. Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 - Analyze the Act’s historical context and relevance to electoral reforms. 13. Intergenerational Equity - Explore how Demeny Voting addresses fairness across generations. 14. Voting in New Zealand - Examine New Zealand’s voting system and its insights for Demeny Voting. 15. Youth Suffrage - Understand youth suffrage and Demeny Voting’s role in promoting youth participation. 16. Youth Rights - Explore the significance of youth rights for inclusive democratic systems. 17. Voting Rights in Singapore - Discover Singapore’s voting rights and lessons for Demeny Voting. 18. Outline of Political Science - Get an overview of political science and its connection to electoral reforms. 19. 2014–2015 Hong Kong Electoral Reform - Analyze Hong Kong’s electoral reforms and their impact on democratic innovations. 20. Outline of Democracy - Gain a structured understanding of democratic principles and their relation to Demeny Voting. 21. Presumptive Inclusion - Examine presumptive inclusion and its influence on democratic systems via Demeny Voting. Demeny Voting provides both theoretical knowledge and practical perspectives on achieving more inclusive democracies. Don’t miss the chance to engage with cutting-edge political science advancements. Invest in Demeny Voting today and be part of the future of governance.
Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Electoral Systems by : Erik S. Herron
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Electoral Systems written by Erik S. Herron and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 1017 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No subject is more central to the study of politics than elections. All across the globe, elections are a focal point for citizens, the media, and politicians long before--and sometimes long after--they occur. Electoral systems, the rules about how voters' preferences are translated into election results, profoundly shape the results not only of individual elections but also of many other important political outcomes, including party systems, candidate selection, and policy choices. Electoral systems have been a hot topic in established democracies from the UK and Italy to New Zealand and Japan. Even in the United States, events like the 2016 presidential election and court decisions such as Citizens United have sparked advocates to promote change in the Electoral College, redistricting, and campaign-finance rules. Elections and electoral systems have also intensified as a field of academic study, with groundbreaking work over the past decade sharpening our understanding of how electoral systems fundamentally shape the connections among citizens, government, and policy. This volume provides an in-depth exploration of the origins and effects of electoral systems.
Book Synopsis Faces on the Ballot by : Alan Renwick
Download or read book Faces on the Ballot written by Alan Renwick and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the key shifts in contemporary politics is the trend towards greater personalization. Collective actors such as political parties are losing relevance. Citizens are slowly dealigning from these actors, and individual politicians are therefore growing in importance in elections, in government, within parties, and in media reporting of politics. A crucial question concerns how this new pattern could be restructuring politics over the long run - notably, whether the personalization of politics is changing the institutional architecture of contemporary democracies. The authors show that the trend towards personalization is indeed changing core democratic institutions. Studying the evolution of electoral systems in thirty-one European democracies since 1945, they demonstrate that, since the 1990s, there has been a shift towards more personalized electoral systems. Electoral systems in most European countries now allow voters to express preferences for candidates, not just for political parties. And the weight of these voters' preferences in the allocation of seats has been increased in numerous countries. They examine the factors that appear to be driving this evolution, finding that the personalization of electoral systems is associated with the growing gap between citizens and politics. Politicians and legislators appear to perceive the personalization of electoral systems as a way to address the democratic malaise and to restore trust in politics by reducing the role of political parties in elections. The book also shows, however, that whether these reforms have had any success in achieving their aims is far less clear. Comparative Politics is a series for students, teachers, and researchers of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu. The Comparative Politics series is edited by Emilie van Haute, Professor of Political Science, Universite libre de Bruxelles; Ferdinand Muller-Rommel, Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Leuphana University; and Susan Scarrow, Chair of the Department of Political Science, University of Houston.
Book Synopsis The Hidden Costs of Clean Election Reform by : Frederic Charles Schaffer
Download or read book The Hidden Costs of Clean Election Reform written by Frederic Charles Schaffer and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Schaffer reveals how tinkering with the electoral process, even with the best of intentions, can easily damage democratic ideals.
Book Synopsis Mixed-Member Electoral Systems in Constitutional Context by : Nathan F. Batto
Download or read book Mixed-Member Electoral Systems in Constitutional Context written by Nathan F. Batto and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-04-11 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reformers have promoted mixed-member electoral systems as the “best of both worlds.” In this volume, internationally recognized political scientists evaluate the ways in which the introduction of a mixed-member electoral system affects the configuration of political parties. The contributors examine several political phenomena, including cabinet post allocation, nominations, preelectoral coalitions, split-ticket voting, and the size of party systems and faction systems. Significantly, they also consider various ways in which the constitutional system—especially whether the head of government is elected directly or indirectly—can modify the incentives created by the electoral system. The findings presented here demonstrate that the success of electoral reform depends not only on the specification of new electoral rules per se but also on the political context—and especially the constitutional framework—within which such rules are embedded.
