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This article analyses the causal effect of the 1993 electoral reform in New Zealand on party system fragmentation using the 'synthetic' control method. Previous studies using cross-national evidence suggest that electoral reforms change the number of parties. However, they do not take into account possible endogeneity problems and usually focus on their short-term effects. Since the electoral system in use in this country before the change was first past the post (FPTP), I can create a 'synthetic' control democracy that had the same institutional framework but did not modify the rules of the game. The results indicate that the electoral reform produced the expected effects on party system size at the electoral level, but that these effects tended to disappear in the long run. In contrast, electoral system effects at the legislative level were larger and stickier over time.

Abundant research provides evidence that electoral systems have an impact on party system fragmentation. Taking up these findings, and adopting a dynamic approach, this article explores the effect of electoral refoms on electoral disproportionality. Specifically, it demonstrates that permissive changes in the electoral system improve the overall correspondence between vote-shares and seat-shares of parties. The explanation is that underrepresented parties in the parliament obtain more seats the more inclusive the electoral rules become. Likewise, disproportionality is higher after a restrictive electoral reform. The article employs my own data on electoral reforms from 59 established and new democracies between 1945 and 2010. Evidence is found not only that electoral reform has an effect on electoral disproportionality as measured with the Gallagher's least squares index, but also that this impact is in turn conditioned by the size of the change in the rules and the level of democratic experience.

Examining Board: Professor Fabrizio Bernardi, EUI Professor Mark N. Franklin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology/EUI (Supervisor) Professor José Ramón Montero, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (External Supervisor) Professor Matthew S. Shugart, University of California, Davis. ; Defence date: 7 June 2013 ; As the "Short Twentieth Century" came to an end, more and more democracies seriously considered the possibility –often for the first time in their history- of changing their national electoral system. Since then, the total number of electoral reforms enacted in countries that select their rulers through free and fair elections has sharply increased: in the last two decades over 33% of the world's democratic states modified the formula employed for choosing the members of their national legislatures, and a similar percentage adjusted other elements of the rules of the game such as the district magnitude, the legal threshold, the assembly size or the ballot structure. Unfortunately, the academic examination of the causes and consequences of these episodes of institutional change has lagged well behind these empirical developments with single case studies and small n studies still the norm. In light of this gap, research on the determinants and the outcomes of electoral reform processes is increasingly needed. The aim of this study is to transcend the analysis of a small number of cases, and instead to comparatively examine the universe of electoral system changes that have occurred in 60 contemporary democracies between 1945 and 2010. The thesis has three main findings. First, the levels of party system fragmentation and citizens' satisfaction with democracy have strong potential to explain electoral system changes in contemporary democracies. Contrary to what is usually implied by the literature on electoral reform, parties are seen to have strong tendencies to pass restrictive rather than permissive electoral system changes in circumstances where the electoral system might be considered to be already overly-permissive resulting in excessive numbers of parties. Moreover, electoral reforms in the intraparty dimension usually take place when large numbers of voters are currently dissatisfied with the way democracy works in their country. The second main finding is that electoral reforms can reshape the morphology of established party systems through two distinct mechanisms of electoral engineering. The first mechanism takes place at the interparty level, with permissive reforms reducing the difference between the percentage of votes received and the percentage of seats obtained by a party, and restrictive reforms enlarging this gap. The second mechanism operates at the intraparty level, where candidate-centred reforms decrease the level of party system nationalization while partycentred reforms leave party system nationalization unchanged. Finally, the third main finding of the thesis is that parties' positions regarding the possible modification of the rules of the game have an electoral effect. Parties that advocate a permissive reform in countries with low party system fragmentation are more likely to electorally benefit. By contrast, support for such reforms when the number of parties is large is more likely to result in electoral loses.

A number of institutional and non-institutional factors hamper electoral coordination and, hence, increase party system fragmentation in the nominal tier of mixed electoral systems. Contrary to expectations, the number of electoral parties is not lower in all old democracies. Nevertheless, the level of democratic experience modifies the effect of other variables like the type of mixed electoral system or the closeness of the races. Econometric tests evaluate this phenomenon in a diverse sample of 15 countries and a total of 57 elections with more than 10,000 observations at the district level. Adapted from the source document.

This article assesses the validity of several alternative hypotheses explaining dual voting across electoral arenas in a decentralized polity. Based on data from three different electoral cycles in Catalonia, I find evidence that the evaluation of the regional candidates of the two main parties has the largest, most consistent impact on vote transfers between levels of government. Results also emphasize, although to a lesser extent, the role played by retrospective voting at the regional level and the impacts that government performance and approval levels regarding national leaders have on the likelihood of casting a dual vote. Altogether, these results not only speak to the dual-voting literature, but also to broader research on the consequences of the de-alignment of the electorate in advanced industrial democracies.

AbstractA number of institutional and non‐institutional factors hamper electoral coordination and, hence, increase party system fragmentation in the nominal tier of mixed electoral systems. Contrary to expectations, the number of electoral parties is not lower in all old democracies. Nevertheless, the level of democratic experience modifies the effect of other variables like the type of mixed electoral system or the closeness of the races. Econometric tests evaluate this phenomenon in a diverse sample of 15 countries and a total of 57 elections with more than 10,000 observations at the district level.

The implementation of the model of territorial organization established by the Spanish Constitution of 1978 involves the creation of non state-wide institutions with legislative powers, and the celebration of regional elections in order to decide the composition of the autonomous parliaments. The turnout registered in this type of contests is persistently and generally lower than in general elections. Those citizens that participate in the general but not in the regional elections are known as differential non-voters. Despite this pattern of non-voting is repeated election after election in all the communities, its magnitude and consequences differ in each case. In this paper, the causes of this variation are explored by using aggregated data of turnout in both types of elections across regions and over time. Results from the specified econometric models seem to point out the need to resort to several socio-demographic, political and institutional factors to explain differential abstention in the decentralized Spain. ; La implementación del modelo de organización territorial establecido por la Constitución española de 1978 supone la creación de entidades no estatales con capacidad legislativa y la celebración de elecciones regionales para decidir la composición de los parlamentos autonómicos. La participación registrada en este tipo de comicios es persistente y generalizadamente más baja que la que se da en las elecciones a Cortes Generales. Aquellos ciudadanos que votan en las elecciones generales pero no en las autonómicas son conocidos como abstencionistas diferenciales. A pesar de que este patrón abstencionista se repite elección tras elección en todas las comunidades, su magnitud y consecuencias difieren en cada caso. En este trabajo se exploran las causas de esta variación utilizando los datos agregados de participación en ambos tipos de elecciones en cada autonomía y momento del tiempo. Los resultados de los modelos econométricos especificados parecen apuntar la necesidad de acudir a diversos factores sociodemográficos, políticos e institucionales para explicar la abstención diferencial en la España autonómica.