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AbstractIn a recent article published in Politics & Gender, Michael Jankowski and Kamil Marcinkiewicz (2019) study the effects of gender quotas on the electoral performance of female candidates in open-list proportional representation (OLPR) systems. On the empirical side, their study is a critical reanalysis of the Polish case, in particular the regularities demonstrated in a 2014 study that I coauthored. We argued there that at the micro level (candidate level), the effects of quotas were somewhat "paradoxical": following the installation of quotas, women candidates tend to perform worse relative to their male counterparts than they did during the pre-quota period. Jankowski and Marcinkiewicz claim to demonstrate that those "paradoxical" effects are minor and thus practically negligible. In this note, I argue that their conclusion is largely a result of the particular methodological choices made by these authors. These choices seem unobvious, debatable, and potentially controversial. The note concludes that we need more reflection and debate on the methodological aspects of analyzing candidates' electoral success in complex electoral systems, such as multidistrict OLPR. This would greatly facilitate future efforts aimed at an unequivocal examination of the contentious concepts such as the notion of "paradox of gender quotas."

The developmental model of voter turnout posits that the propensity to vote (or abstain) is a habit acquired during the period of a young adult's socialisation to the electoral process. Once acquired, the habit tends to persist and the individual becomes fairly 'immune' to the potential influences hypothesised to affect turnout. In particular, Franklin proposes that electoral context will have a strong impact on those who have no or little experience of voting (or abstaining) in democratic elections but virtually no impact on those whose 'electoral experience' is more substantial. Tests of the above crucial hypothesis have focused mostly on the heterogeneous effects of electoral competitiveness (election closeness) on turnout. I follow the same route but also point to potential drawbacks of the tests performed so far. At the same time, I propose what I claim is a superior test of experience-conditioned impact of closeness on turnout. My test – utilising data on sixteen Swedish elections conducted between 1956 and 2006 – yields suggestive results supporting Franklin's hypothesis.

Iversen and Soskice's notion that electoral rules affect democracies' propensity for income redistribution is one of the political economy's most discussed concepts. Yet, it comes with a number of caveats. Most importantly, it is not clear whether electoral rules indeed affect states' propensity for redistribution or vice versa and thus whether or not Iversen and Soskice's findings are spurious. In this article, we focus on the critical case of New Zealand's electoral reform of the 1990s and offer a comprehensive test of Iversen and Soskice's concept. We employ the recently developed Bayesian alternative to the synthetic control method and compare the relevant dynamics for New Zealand to those of six majoritarian democracies. Our results largely support Iversen and Soskice's claims; due to the lower prevalence of right (center-right) governments, proportional representation democracies tend to redistribute more than majoritarian ones.

AbstractRecent decades have seen a worldwide diffusion of electoral gender quotas, an institution designed to enhance women's political representation. This has sparked scholars' interest in the actual effects of quotas, including their impact on female descriptive (numeric) representation in national legislatures. As with many other issues within the domain of comparative politics, however, establishing causality with respect to the effect of quota laws is intrinsically difficult. In this article, we attempt to overcome these difficulties. We apply the generalised synthetic control method to study the impact of legislated candidate quotas on the descriptive parliamentary representation of women in three European countries: Belgium, Greece and Poland. As these states elect their national parliaments by means of variants of a proportional representation system with preferential voting for candidates, we compare their levels of female descriptive representation to a set of corresponding figures observed for a 'synthetic control' unit, comprising 16 European countries that implement fundamentally similar electoral systems but do not have legislated candidate quotas in place. The quota effects that we obtain vary substantially among the three cases analysed. The apparent effect for Belgium is strong, while much weaker effects are observed for the two other states. Relying on the extant literature, we qualitatively interpret these results, putting forward a number of conjectures as to how contextual factors can contribute to the strength and persistence of quota effects. We conclude that the impact of legislated candidate quotas is essentially limited, albeit it may be magnified under favourable contextual conditions, such as those which occurred in Belgium.

We exploit a rare natural experiment, a recent reform of local elections in Poland, to study an extension of Duverger's laws. We analyse party system fragmentation under single-member plurality rule vis-à-vis a proportional representation formula accompanied by a legal threshold. We demonstrate that the presence of a threshold alters Duverger's 'psychological' effect. Proportional representation with a threshold tends to be on a par with single-member plurality as regards restricting the effective number of electoral parties, largely due to the absence of smaller groupings with spatially concentrated support. At the same time, Duverger's 'mechanical' effect takes a rather standard form, single-member plurality being relatively powerful at constraining the effective number of legislative parties.