Party-system extremism in majoritarian and proportional electoral systems

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 41, Issue 2, 2011, Pages 341-361

  Dow, Jay K ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 82455252105     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123410000360     Document Type: Article

References (71)

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2. Norman Schofield, Spatial Models of Politics (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. xiii;
3. Lawrence Ezrow, 'Parties' Policy Programmes and the Dog That Didn't Bark: No Evidence That Proportional Systems Promote Extreme Party Positioning', British Journal of Political Science, 38 (2008), 479-97.
4. The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (www.cses.org), CSES Module 1, Full Release [dataset] (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for Political Studies, 4 August 2003);
5. The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. CSES Module 2, Full Release [dataset] (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for Political Studies, 27 June 2007).
6. For a detailed discussion of the CSES data, as well as the advantages and shortcomings of these data for particular research programmes, see Pippa Norris, Electoral Engineering: Voting Rules and Political Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
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10. R. D. McKelvey and N. Schofield, 'Generalized Symmetry Conditions at a Core Point', Econometrica, 55 (1987), 923-33.
11. Refer also to R. D. McKelvey and P. C. Ordeshook, 'Information, Electoral Equilibria, and the Democratic Ideal', Journal of Politics, 48 (1986), 909-37;
12. T. Feddersen, I. Sened and S. G. Wright, 'Sophisticated Voting and Candidate Entry Under Plurality Rule', American Journal of Political Science, 34 (1990), 1005-16;
13. James Adams and Samuel Merrill, 'Why Small, Centrist Third Parties Motivate Policy Divergence by Major Parties', American Political Science Review, 100 (2006), 403-17.
14. T.-M. Lin, J. M. Enelow and H. Dorussen, 'Equilibrium in Multicandidate Probabilistic Spatial Voting', Public Choice, 98 (1999), 59-82;
15. Norman Schofield and Itai Sened, Multiparty Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
16. Donald Wittman, 'Spatial Strategies When Candidates Have Policy Preferences', in James M. Enelow and Melvin J. Hinich, eds, Advances in the Spatial Theory of Voting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
17. Samuel Merrill and James Adams, 'Centrifugal Incentives in Multi-Candidate Elections', Journal of Theoretical Politics, 14 (2002), 275-300;
18. J. Adams, S. Merrill and B. Grofman, A Unified Theory of Party Competition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
19. Enelow and Hinich, The Spatial Theory of Voting
20. Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, 'U.S. Presidential Elections 1960 - 1980:A Spatial Analysis', American Journal of Political Science, 46 (1984), 1061-79;
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23. James Adams and Samuel Merrill III, 'Spatial Models of Candidate Competition and the 1988 French Presidential Election: Are Presidential Candidates Vote-Maximizers?' Journal of Politics, 62 (2000), 729-56
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26. Schofield and Sened, Multiparty Democracy.
27. Jay K. Dow, 'A Comparative Spatial Analysis of Majoritarian and Proportional Elections', Electoral Studies, 20 (2001), 109-25
28. Ezrow, 'Parties' Policy Programmes and the Dog That Didn't Bark'.
29. Dow, 'A Comparative Spatial Analysis of Majoritarian and Proportional Elections'.
30. Schofield and Sened, Multiparty Democracy.
31. Schofield and Sened, Multiparty Democracy, pp. 76-7, pp. 133-6.
32. Ezrow, 'Parties' Policy Programmes and the Dog That Didn't Bark'.
33. Karlheinz Reif and Anna Melich, Euro-Barometer 31A: European Elections, 1989: Post-Election Survey, June-July 1989 [computer file], conducted by Faits et Opinions, Paris, ICPSR edn (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [producer and distributor], 1993), doi:10.3886/ICPSR09360.
34. Such comparability problems are intrinsic to analyses that obtain party placements from manifesto analysis or expert placements when these are superimposed on voter distributions obtained from survey responses, such as those obtained from the Eurobarometer or the American National Election Studies project. Analysis not reported here studies the relationship between electoral proportionality and party system compactness when party locations are determined by the expert placements recorded in the CSES data. Contrary to the results reported later in this article, these reveal no relationship between partysystem compactness and any electoral-system characteristic.
35. Ian Budge and Michael D. McDonald, 'Choices Parties Define: Policy Alternatives in Representative Elections, 17 Countries 1945-1998', Party Politics, 12 (2006), 451-66;
36. Roy Pierce, 'Mass-Elite Issue Linkages and the Responsible Party Model of Representation', in Warren Miller et al., Policy Representation in Western Democracies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
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42. Ezrow, 'Parties' Policy Programmes and the Dog That Didn't Bark'.
43. Michael Gallagher, 'Proportionality, Disproportionality and Electoral Systems', Electoral Studies, 10 (1991), 33-51;
44. Arend Lijphart, Electoral Systems and Party Systems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
45. For example, nationally, Democratic House candidates in 2006 received 51.97 per cent of the vote, while Republican House candidates received 44.06 per cent of the vote. These vote shares returned 53.6 per cent of the House seats to the Democratic party and 46.4 per cent of the House seats to the Republican party in the first session of the 110th Congress. This reflects proportionality being generally discussed as a national-level characteristic, and by this definition, the United States is quite proportional. The proportionality of the US case is also observed by Norris, Electoral Engineering, p. 90.
46. G. Bingham Powell Jr. and Georg S. Vanberg, 'Election Laws, Disproportionality and Median Correspondence: Implications for Two Versions of Democracy', British Journal of Political Science, 30 (2000), 383-411.
47. See, for example, Norris, Electoral Engineering, pp. 88-93. She reports vote-seat shares as a function of electoral system type.
48. Exclusive of the sixteen 'overhang' Bundestag seats.
49. Rein Taagepera and Matthew Soberg Shugart, Seats and Votes (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 126-33
50. Lijphart, Electoral Systems and Party Systems, pp. 30-46;
51. Michael Gallagher and Paul Mitchell, 'Introduction to Electoral Systems', in Michael Gallagher and Paul Mitchell, eds, The Politics of Electoral Systems (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 15-17;
52. Matthew Soberg Shugart and Martin P. Wattenberg, 'Mixed Member Electoral Systems: A Definition and Typology', in Matthew Soberg Shugart and Martin P. Wattenberg, eds, Mixed Member Electoral Systems (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
53. For a discussion of using average district magnitude to calculate the effective threshold, see Lijphart, Electoral Systems and Party Systems, pp. 28-9.
54. Lijphart, Electoral Systems and Party Systems, p. 27.
55. Cox, 'Centripetal and Centrifugal Incentives in Electoral Systems'.
56. Merrill and Adams, 'Centrifugal Incentives in Multi-Candidate Elections'.
57. Adams and Merrill, 'Why Small, Centrist Third Parties Motivate Policy Divergence by Major Parties'.
58. Markku Laakso and Rein Taagepera, 'Effective Number of Parties: A Measure with Application to West Europe', Comparative Political Studies, 12 (1979), 3-27.
59. Freedom House, Freedom in the World, Country Ratings: 1972-2006.
60. Lijphart, Electoral Systems and Party Systems, pp. 147-9;
61. Taagepera and Shugart, Seats and Votes, pp. 93-4.
62. Michael J. Laver, 'Models of Government Formation', Annual Review of Political Science, 1 (1988), 1-15;
63. Michael J. Laver and Norman Schofield, Multiparty Government: The Politics of Coalitions in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990);
64. Schofield and Sened, Multiparty Democracy
65. Lanny W. Martin and Randolf T. Stevenson, 'Government Formation in Parliamentary Democracies', American Journal of Political Science, 45 (2001), 33-50;
66. Craig Volden and Clifford J. Carrubba, 'The Formation of Oversized Coalitions in Parliamentary Democracies', American Journal of Political Science, 48 (2004), 521-37.
67. The sole exception in Ezrow's study is the 1989 Greek election. Otherwise, all observations are of West European nations.
68. Reif and Melich, Euro-Barometer 31A: European Elections, 1989: Post-Election Survey, June-July 1989 [computer file].
69. One important difference between the Eurobarometer and the CSES left-right scales is that the former is based on 1-10 points, while the latter is based on 0-10. This means that unlike the CSES, the Eurobarometer has no middle value. It is unclear whether this contributes to the discrepancies in our findings;
70. Ezrow, 'Parties' Policy Programmes and the Dog That Didn't Bark'.
71. B. Geddes, 'How the Cases You Choose Affect the Answers You Get: Selection Bias in Comparative Politics', in J. A. Stimson, ed., Political Analysis, Vol. 2 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1990).