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AbstractThis article develops a theory to account for the variation in electoral systems in electoral authoritarian regimes. We argue that resource-rich dictators are incentivized to employ proportional representation systems to alleviate the threat from the masses and pre-empt the emergence of new opposition, while resource-poor dictators tend to choose majoritarian systems to co-opt ruling elites in the legislature. Using cross-national data on electoral authoritarian regimes, we find strong empirical evidence supporting our theory. We also explicitly illustrate the causal links between natural resources and electoral systems with additional statistical analyses and comparative case studies on Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

AbstractWho gets represented in legislatures, and how does this depend on electoral institutions? Others have asked this question from the perspective of gender, race, and class. We focus on space, asking whether MPs disproportionately come from some places rather than others and how this depends on electoral rules. Using data on over 13,000 legislators in sixty-two democracies, we developed a new measure to determine whether the spatial distribution of MP birthplaces matched the spatial distribution of the citizens they represented. Contrary to received wisdom, single-member district systems do not have more geographically representative parliaments than multi-member district systems, while mixed-member systems perform significantly better than both. We attribute the higher spatial representativeness of mixed-member systems to the contamination effects in their single-member tier. We present evidence for this explanation from a within-country analysis of elections in Italy, the UK, and Germany.

This paper provides a political explanation for the form of corporate governance captured by the degree of minority shareholder protection (MSP). Using a multi-stage game model of three-party competition under proportional electoral systems, I demonstrate that the electoral threshold-the minimum percentage of votes a party must receive to get at least one seat in parliamentary PR systems-is inversely related to the degree of MSP. This finding represents an important modification to formal models in the political economic literature that tends to omit the political process. Adapted from the source document.

This paper constructs a game-theoretic model of elections in alternative electoral systems with three or four candidates. Each electoral system specifies how the platforms of the candidates & their scores give rise to an outcome. When geometrical analysis shows that two outcomes can compete against each other for victory, a pivot probability is associated to that pair. Each voter is rational & picks the candidate that maximizes her expected utility, which results from the balancing of her preferences & beliefs about the pivot-probabilities. Candidate positioning is endogenous & the result of a Nash game. The possible equilibria are computed for plurality & runoff majority systems. 5 Figures, 2 Appendixes, 18 References. Adapted from the source document.

At regular intervals in the United States political parties conduct campaigns, the purpose of which is to elect their chosen candidates to public office. Each party seeks political power, guided in this pursuit by a complex set of election laws which spell out in detail the rights and duties of the parties. The electoral process is the mechanism by which power is maintained within a party or transferred to a competing party. The legitimate right of one party to take power from another when the people so elect is enforced. The ideal image of the American political system in action reflects two parties struggling to maximize the interests of their constituents in the hope of maximizing votes in the next election. Out of this struggle the rights of the people are preserved.

Political scientists have long theorized that the use of Òpreferential Ó election systems can help promote successful conflict management in divided societies.As it turns out,evidence from five real-world cases supports this conclusion.

Simple plurality election systems (commonly known as 'First-Past-The-Post') are often associated with the dominance of two political parties. Such systems tend to reward leading parties with too many seats (known as the 'mechanical' effect) and provoke tactical voting, where voters switch away from trailing parties (known as the 'psychological' effect). We view tactical voting as a coordination problem. A group of voters wish to prevent a win by a disliked party (such as the Conservatives in recent UK elections) and must partially coordinate behind a single challenger (such as Labour or the Liberal Democrats) in order to do this. Crucially, voters have limited information on the situation within their constituency and hence there is no common knowledge of the game being played - tactical voting is a global game. We show that in this setting, voters will only partially coordinate. Furthermore, tactical voting exhibits negative feedback - tactical voting by others reduces the incentive for an individual to vote tactically, since they become concerned that they may switch in the wrong direction. We calibrate our model, and apply it to the UK General Election of 1997. Throughout England, we find that the 'mechanical' and 'psychological' effects tend to offset each other: Tactical voting serves to reverse the Conservative bias that results from the geographic distribution of votes.

Simple plurality election systems (commonly known as 'First-Past-The-Post') are often associated with the dominance of two political parties. Such systems tend to reward leading parties with too many seats (known as the 'mechanical' effect) and provoke tactical voting, where voters switch away from trailing parties (known as the 'psychological' effect). We view tactical voting as a coordination problem. A group of voters wish to prevent a win by a disliked party (such as the Conservatives in recent UK elections) and must partially coordinate behind a single challenger (such as Labour or the Liberal Democrats) in order to do this. Crucially, voters have limited information on the situation within their constituency and hence there is no common knowledge of the game being played - tactical voting is a global game. We show that in this setting, voters will only partially coordinate. Furthermore, tactical voting exhibits negative feedback - tactical voting by others reduces the incentive for an individual to vote tactically, since they become concerned that they may switch in the wrong direction. We calibrate our model, and apply it to the UK General Election of 1997. Throughout England, we find that the 'mechanical' and 'psychological' effects tend to offset each other: Tactical voting serves to reverse the Conservative bias that results from the geographic distribution of votes.