Suchergebnisse

Parties tend to be wary of candidate-centred electoral systems, which is one factor why the use of the Single Transferable Vote (STV) is limited to a few cases. One source of this wariness is that STV is thought to favour non-party candidates, or independents, a claim based primarily on the experience of Ireland. The relative absence of independents in Australia and Malta, the other two countries using STV for national elections, challenges the merits of this reasoning. This study re-examines the nature of this causal link using constituency-level data from the Irish and Australian cases. The results indicate that there is not a great deal of evidence to support the hypothesis that STV favours independents, in particular because electoral system detail can affect a system's ability to realize expected consequences. While constituency size, ballot access and ballot design affect support for independents, it is not always in the expected manner. This suggests that the non-party phenomenon is more than just a by-product of electoral system effects. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

In this article we use concentration of electoral support for individual candidates and divergence between party and electorate preferences for candidates to test hypotheses about the party-electorate relationship. We test these using data from preferential voting in Slovak general elections between 1998 and 2010. Our results suggest that low concentration is associated with parties based on ideology and high concentration with parties based on leadership. Age of the party fails to predict the concentration or the divergence. For coalitions, type of coalition matters in regard to divergence. Furthermore, we document that divergence increases with the size of the electoral support, though this seems to be true only for larger parties. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

A significant and influential body of research suggests that electoral systems influence legislators' behaviour. Yet, individual legislators are potentially motivated by other concerns, such as policy and office. What happens when competing goals predict contradictory behaviour, for example, when electoral incentives clash with enticements to win prized post-election positions (mega-seats)? When party leaders cartelize the allocation of mega-seats, the anticipated effects of the electoral system on legislators' behaviour may dissolve -- creating strong parties in the legislature despite a candidate-centred electoral system. New data on mega-seats and voting behaviour in the Irish parliament between 1980 and 2010 supports the notion that mega-seat considerations trump the impact of the electoral system on roll-call behaviour. The implication is that what goes on within the legislature may be more important for influencing legislators' behaviour than what goes on at the ballot box. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]