Political efficacy and participation in twenty-seven democracies: How electoral systems shape political behaviour

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 38, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 311-334

  Karp, Jeffrey A ^a   Banducci, Susan A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EXETER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 48849093313     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123408000161     Document Type: Article

References (99)

1. G. Bingham Powell Jr, 'American Voter Turnout in Comparative Perspective', American Political Science Review, 80 (1986), 17-43;
2. André Blais and Agnieszka Dobrzynska, 'Turnout in Electoral Democracies', European Journal of Political Research, 33 (1998), 239-61.
3. One notable exception is Cees van der Eijk and Mark Franklin, who examine the relative importance of institutional and individual level factors on electoral participation in elections to the European Parliament. These elections, however, by the authors' accounts are 'second order' elections that are widely perceived as unimportant and consequently 'fail to function as proper elections' (Cees van der Eijk and Mark Franklin, eds, Choosing Europe? The European Electorate and National Politics in the Face of Union (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996)).
4. Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 284-6.
5. Robert Jackman, 'Political Institutions and Voter Turnout in Industrial Democracies', American Political Science Review, 81 (1987), 405-23
6. André Blais and R. K. Carty, 'Does Proportional Representation Foster Voter Turnout', European Journal of Political Research, 18 (1990), 167-81.
7. Blais and Dobrzynska, 'Turnout in Electoral Democracies', p. 251.
8. Shaun Bowler, David Lanoue and Paul Savoie, 'Electoral Systems, Party Competition, and Strength of Partisan Attachment: Evidence from Three Countries', Journal of Politics, 56 (1994), 991-1007;
9. Shaun Bowler and David Lanoue, 'Strategic and Protest Voting for Third Parties: The Case of the Canadian NDP', Western Political Quarterly, 45 (1992), 485-99.
10. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963);
11. Pippa Norris, Electoral Engineering: Voting Rules and Political Behavior (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
12. Blais and Dobrzynska, 'Turnout in Electoral Democracies'; van der Eijk and Franklin, Choosing Europe?;
13. Mark N. Franklin, 'Electoral Participation' in Laurence LeDuc, Richard G. Niemi and Pippa Norris, eds, Comparing Democracies: Elections and Voting in Global Perspective (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996).
14. Jeffrey A. Karp, Susan A. Banducci and Shaun Bowler, 'Getting Out the Vote: Party Mobilization in a Comparative Perspective', British Journal of Political Science, 38 (2008), 91-112.
15. Jackman, 'Political Institutions and Voter Turnout in Industrial Democracies';
16. Mark Gray and Miki Caul, 'Declining Voter Turnout in Advanced Industrial Democracies, 1950-1997: The Effects of Declining Group Mobilization', Comparative Political Studies, 33 (2000), 1091-122;
17. Andrea Ladner and Henry Milner, 'Do Voters Turn Out More under Proportional then Majoritarian Systems? The Evidence from Swiss Communal Elections', Electoral Studies, 18 (1999), 235-50.
18. Jackman, 'Political Institutions and Voter Turnout in Industrial Democracies'.
19. Ladner and Miller, 'Do Voters Turn Out More under Proportional then Majoritarian Systems?'.
20. Richard S. Katz, A Theory of Parties and Electoral Systems (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).
21. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957).
22. Bowler, Lanoue and Savoie, 'Electoral Systems, Party Competition, and Strength of Partisan Attachment'.
23. Angus Campbell, Phillip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller and Donald E. Stokes, The American Voter (New York: Wiley & Sons, 1960);
24. Sidney Verba, Norman H. Nie and Jae-On Kim, Participation and Political Equality: A Seven-Nation Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
25. Christopher J. Anderson and Christine A. Guillory, 'Political Institutions and Satisfaction with Democracy: A Cross-National Analysis of Consensus and Majoritarian Systems', American Political Science Review, 91 (1997), 66-81.
26. Arend Lijphart. Democracies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984).
27. Susan A. Banducci, Todd Donovan and Jeffrey A. Karp, 'Proportional Representation and Attitudes about Politics: Evidence from New Zealand', Electoral Studies, 18 (1999), 533-55;
28. Jack Vowles, Peter Aimer, Susan Banducci and Jeffrey Karp, eds, Voter's Victory? New Zealand's First Election Under Proportional Representation (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1998);
29. Jeffrey A. Karp and Susan A. Banducci, 'The Impact of Proportional Representation on Turnout: Evidence from New Zealand', Australian Journal of Political Science, 34 (1999), 363-77.
30. George Tsebelis, 'Decision-Making in Political Systems: Veto Players in Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, Multicameralism and Multipartism', British Journal of Political Science, 25 (1995), 289-325.
31. Arend Lijphart, 'Unequal Participation: Democracy's Unresolved Dilemma. Presidential Address, American Political Science Association, 1996', American Political Science Review, 91 (1997), 1-14, at p. 9.
32. The World Values Surveys (1981-84; 1990-93) include a wealth of data from forty-five countries measuring political attitudes and confidence in political institutions. The International Social Survey Program (ISSP) is another valuable source for cross-national data on political behaviour and attitudes. However, since neither of these studies is conducted to coincide with an election, there is no direct measure of whether or not a citizen cast a ballot.
33. CSES Secretariat, 'The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems Final Report of the 1995-96 Planning Committee' (Center for Political Studies: Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1996), 〈http://www.umich.edu/~nes/cses/final report.html〉.
34. The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems 〈www.cses.org〉. CSES Module 1 Full Release (dataset). (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for Political Studies, 2003). This analysis relies on the 4 August 2003 'full release' of Module 1 (1996-2001). To increase the number of countries, data from the 29 June 2005 version of Module 2 (2001-06) have also been added. These countries include Belgium, Finland and Ireland. Countries holding only presidential elections have been excluded. Other countries that were included in this release have been excluded because of missing values or incomplete information. For further information about the CSES see: 〈http://www.umich. edu/~nes/cses/cses.htm〉.
35. Neil Nevitte, André Blais, Elisabeth Gidengil and Richard Nadeau, 'Socio-economic Status and Non-Voting: ACross National Comparative Analysis' (paper presented at the 18th World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Quebec, 2000).
36. At first glance, the CSES may appear to under-represent the number of plurality countries. The sample includes Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. There are, however, few other plurality countries with established national election studies that could have been included (i.e. India). Similarly, according to Farrell's classification there are only three countries (Australia, France and Mali) with a majoritarian system. See David M. Farrell, Electoral Systems: A Comparative Introduction (New York: Palgrave, 2001), at p. 8. Given the small sample, we consider plurality and majority systems together since these systems represent one form of democracy that produce essentially the same electoral trends while PR systems represent another.
37. See Farrell, Electoral Systems, at p. 63;
38. Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy and G. Bingham Powell Jr, Elections as Instruments of Democracy: Majoritarian and Proportional Visions (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000).
39. Richard S. Katz, Democracy and Elections (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 134.
40. Hungary also has a mixed system where 176 members are elected by majority in single-member districts and 152 members are elected by PR. An additional fifty-eight national seats are used to correct some of the distortions that remain (see André Blais and Louis Massicotte, 'Electoral Systems' in Laurence LeDuc, Richard G. Niemi and Pippa Norris, eds, Comparing Democracies #2: New Challenges in the Study of Elections and Voting (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2002), pp. 40-69, at p. 55). Since it is not entirely corrective, we classify it as a mixed system.
41. Blais and Massicote, 'Electoral Systems', p. 57;
42. Richard Gunther, 'Electoral Laws, Party Systems, and Elites: The Case of Spain', American Political Science Review, 83 (1989), 835-59.
43. Disproportionality in Spain can also be attributed to malapportionment (see Arend Lijphart, Electoral Systems and Party Systems: A Study of Twenty-Seven Democracies, 1945-1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), at pp. 126-8).
44. Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture.
45. Warren E. Miller, Arthur H. Miller and Edward J. Schneider, American National Election Studies Data Sourcebook, 1952-1978 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980);
46. Richard G. Niemi, Stephen C. Craig and Franco Mattei. 'Measuring Internal Political Efficacy in the 1988 National Election Study', American Political Science Review, 85 (1991), 1407-13;
47. Stephen C. Craig, 'Political Efficacy and Trust: A Report on the NES Pilot Study Items', Political Behavior, 12 (1990), 289-314.
48. Miller, Miller and Schneider, American National Election Studies Data Sourcebook, 1952-1978.
49. About 3 per cent of the total cases are missing, of which less than half are coded as 'don't know'. These missing cases are not evenly distributed across countries. Some of these missing values correspond to missing values on other variables suggesting that the problem is not unique to this variable. Since we cannot be sure why these cases are missing, they have been dropped from the analysis.
50. Empirical evidence also supports this view. We compared the CSES measure with other measures of efficacy available in four national election studies. The findings are consistent with Acock, Clarke and Stewart who find that a two-factor solution (internal and external dimensions) to the efficacy indicators fits across a number of countries. See Alan Acock, Harold D. Clarke and Marianne C. Stewart, 'A New Model for Old Measures: A Covariance Structure Analysis of Political Efficacy', Journal of Politics, 47 (1985), 1062-84. In all four election studies, the CSES item loaded most strongly with the other items measuring external efficacy. Therefore, there is clear evidence that the CSES item measures an aspect of external efficacy. These results can be obtained at 〈http://www.jkarp.com/bjps/〉.
51. Samuel H. Barnes, M. Kent Jennings, Ronald Inglehart and Barbara Farah, 'Party Identification and Party Closeness in Comparative Perspective', Political Behavior, 10 (1988), 215-31.
52. Specifically 43 per cent of the sample responded that they were close to a political party and 5 per cent refused to answer the question. Moreover, fewer people feel close to small parties. For example, in the United States, only ten respondents feel close to the Reform party while eighty-six respondents express a preference for that party over the Republican and Democratic parties.
53. Brian D. Silver, Barbara A. Anderson and Paul R. Abramson, 'Who Overreports Voting?' American Political Science Review, 80 (1986), 613-24;
54. Michael W. Traugott and John P Katosh, 'Response Validity in Surveys of Voting Behavior', Public Opinion Quarterly, 43 (1979), 359-77.
55. Aage R. Clausen, 'Response Validity: Vote Report', Public Opinion Quarterly, 32 (1968), 588-606;
56. Traugott and Katosh, 'Response Validity in Surveys of Voting Behavior';
57. Silver, Anderson and Abramson, 'Who Overreports Voting?' 39 Kevin Swaddle and Anthony Heath. 'Official and Reported Turnout in the British General Election of 1987', British Journal of Political Science, 19 (1989), 537-70;
58. Donald Granberg and Soren Holmberg, 'Self-Reported Turnout and Voter Validation', American Journal of Political Science, 35 (1991), 448-59;
59. Karp and Banducci, 'The Impact of Proportional Representation on Turnout'.
60. André Blais, To Vote or Not to Vote: The Merits and Limits of Rational Choice Theory (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), p. 176;
61. Henry E. Brady, Sydney Verba and Kay Lehman Schlozman, 'Beyond SES: A Resource Model of Political Participation', American Political Science Review, 89 (1995), 271-95, p. 292;
62. Jeffrey A. Karp and David Brockington, 'Social Desirability and Response Validity: A Comparative Analysis of Over-reporting Voter Turnout in Five Countries' Journal of Politics, 67 (2005), 825-40.
63. For example the British Election Study asked, 'Talking to people about the general election, we have found that a lot of people didn't manage to vote. How about you - did you manage to vote in the general election?' Similarly in Switzerland the question was asked, 'On average, about half of the electorate casts a ballot at federal elections. How about you? Did you cast a ballot at the federal elections on October 24?'
64. The proportion claiming to be close to a party is slightly higher in plurality systems than in PR systems. However, the proportion who are very close to a party is the same across systems (see 〈http://www.jkarp.com/bjps/ 〉). Given the strong theoretical expectations that attachments to parties varies across electoral systems and the lack of variance in party proximity measures suggests that our alternative measure (which does vary across systems) is more appropriate.
65. These results can be obtained at 〈http://www.jkarp.com/bjps/〉.
66. Blais and Carty, 'Does Proportional Representation Foster Voter Turnout.'
67. The measure is derived from Gallagher's least squares index and is based on the election when the survey was conducted. See Michael Gallagher. 'Proportionality, Disproportionality and Electoral Systems', Electoral Studies, 10 (1991), 33-51.
68. The models were estimated with and without 'No preference' (which account for less than 5 per cent of the sample) to determine whether this influenced the effects for strength of preference. The effects remained the same.
69. Franklin uses the size of the largest party to measure the decisiveness of elections. While this measure may be correlated with the size of a government coalition it is not necessarily the same. See Mark N. Franklin, Voter Turnout and the Dynamics of Electoral Competition in Established Democracies Since 1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
70. Franklin, Voter Turnout and the Dynamics of Electoral Competition in Established Democracies Since 1945.
71. It was not possible to apply the measure below the national level in all districted systems because of missing data in a number of countries.
72. Marco R. Steenbergen and Bradford Jones, 'Modeling Multilevel Data Structures', American Journal of Political Science, 46 (2002), 218-37;
73. Stephen W. Raudenbush and Anthony S. Bryk, Hierarchical Linear Models: Applications and Data Analysis Methods (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2002).
74. Estimations based on treating the data as structured by a single level of measurement and adjusting for standard errors for clustering at the country level are available from the authors. When comparing estimates from traditional logit models to multilevel logit models, the largest differences occur in the estimation of standard errors for factors measured at the country level.
75. We report the results of a binary logit model predicting only the highest level of efficacy. In other analyses (available from the authors), we estimated an ordered logit model. The results are essentially the same although the coefficients are obviously altered.
76. The odds ratio for a ten unit change in strength of party preference is 4.48.
77. The number of parties in parliament and disproportionality are correlated (-0.54). When disproportionality is not included in the model, the number of parties has a stronger influence. Several transformations of these variables were tested. All transformations performed equally, so we used the linear function.
78. Bernadette C. Hayes and Clive S. Bean, 'Political Efficacy: A Comparative Study of the United States, West Germany, Great Britain and Australia', European Journal of Political Research, 23 (1993), 261-80.
79. Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture;
80. Cliff Zukin, Scott Keeter, Molly Andolina, Krista Jenkins and Michael X. Delli Carpini, A New Engagement? Political Participation, Civic Life, and the Changing American Citizen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), at pp. 118-19.
81. It is possible that the relationship between efficacy and participation is reciprocal. That is, once citizens have participated, their level of efficacy will increase. Unfortunately, our reliance on cross-sectional data makes it almost impossible to test this hypothesis. See Steven E. Finkel, 'Reciprocal Effects of Participation on Political Efficacy: A Panel Analysis', American Journal of Political Science, 29 (1985), 891-913, p. 894. Moreover, to our knowledge the efficacy measure used by the CSES does not appear to have been asked both before and after an election so it is not possible to test the hypothesis with other data. Nevertheless, we believe that it is reasonable to characterize the relationship as one where efficacy influences voter participation. In terms of face validity, the question about efficacy is asked in the present tense rather than in the past tense, which forces citizens to think in more general terms rather than in the context of the recent electoral outcome and their past participation.
82. Similar to the efficacy model, the effect of strength of party preference varies significantly across countries. Therefore, like the efficacy model, we have allowed for random effects at the country level.
83. In this case, we constructed a variable that measured the lowest party evaluation. If a person strongly disliked one party and strongly liked another, they would receive a high score on both preference measures.
84. When efficacy is omitted from the model and Switzerland is included as a dummy variable, coalition size is no longer significant. Franklin argues that it is not the size of the coalition, but rather the fact that there is little alternation in power in Switzerland that accounts for low voter turnout. See Franklin, Voter Turnout and the Dynamics of Electoral Competition in Established Democracies Since 1945.
85. Norris, Electoral Engineering.
86. Sarah Birch, 'Single-member District Electoral Systems and Democratic Transition', Electoral Studies, 24 (2005), 281-301;
87. Jeffrey A. Karp and Susan A. Banducci, 'Party Mobilization and Political Participation in New and Old Democracies', Party Politics, 13 (2007), 217-34.
88. The effect is lower when all of the countries with compulsory voting are considered together irrespective of how the law is enforced. When considered separately, the impact is greatest for Australia and Belgium, where the level of enforcement is viewed as being stricter than in Mexico.
89. We also examined whether candidate based or party list systems influenced efficacy. These factors were not significant.
90. Katz, Democracy and Elections.
91. Shaun Bowler and Todd Donovan, 'Democracy, Institutions and Attitudes about Citizen Influence on Government', British Journal of Political Science, 32 (2002), 371-90;
92. Bruno S. Frey, Marcel Kucher and Alois Stutzer. 'Outcome, Process and Power in Direct Democracy: New Econometric Results', Public Choice, 107 (2001), 271-93.
93. Van der Eijk and Franklin, Choosing Europe?;
94. Franklin, 'Electoral Participation'. In other models not reported here we found no evidence that postal or Sunday voting influenced voter participation in the CSES sample.
95. Anderson and Guillory, 'Political Institutions and Satisfaction with Democracy'. It is also possible that electoral outcomes can influence winners' and losers' sense of political efficacy. Although one might hypothesize that efficacy is partly influenced by whether one voted for a winner or loser, we should also expect the indicator to tap into more long-term feelings about the political system. See Susan A. Banducci and Jeffrey A. Karp, 'How Elections Change the Way Citizens View the Political System: Campaigns, Media Effects, and Electoral Outcomes in Comparative Perspective', British Journal of Political Science, 33 (2003), 443-67, p. 464. Thus these observed differences are most likely a consequence of long-term loss rather than being the result of the more immediate electoral outcome.
96. Banducci, Donovan and Karp, 'Proportional Representation and Attitudes about Politics';
97. and 'The Impact of Proportional Representation on Turnout'.
98. Bowler, Lanoue and Savoie, 'Electoral Systems, Party Competition, and Strength of Partisan Attachment'.
99. Campbell et al., The American Voter.