Suchergebnisse

At least four criterions/methods to measure mechanical effects of electoral systems can be distinguished: measuring disproportionality, the reduction in number of parties, the party advantages & the threshold percentages. In this manuscript we focus on the thresholds. We first concentrate on a description of legal, theoretical, & empirical thresholds as measures of mechanical effects. Further, we analyse the relationship between (the natural logarithm) of district magnitude & the empirical threshold & between the empirical threshold & the effective number of parties. As starting point we take districts in Spain, Portugal & Hungary as the level of analysis. We clearly show that there is a negative causal connection between district magnitude & the threshold percentage & between threshold percentage & the number of parties. Tables, Figures. Adapted from the source document.

Electoral institutions shape the incentive that elected representatives have to cultivate a personal vote, a geographically-concentrated personal vote in particular. But are electoral institutions able to make representatives do what they would not do otherwise and to make them not do what they otherwise would have done? Using data from the cross-national PARTIREP MP Survey, it is demonstrated that electoral institutions shape elected representatives' local orientation. Local orientation decreases as district magnitude grows - regardless of what representatives think about political representation. But representatives' conceptions of representation do shape their uptake in the legislative arena from their contacts with individual constituents. The effect of the electoral incentive grows stronger as elected representatives think of representation as a bottom-up rather than a top-down process. Adapted from the source document.