The electoral system-rules governing how votes translate into seats in the legislature-is critical to affecting the quality of representation in any democracy. How does the electoral system influence the qualities of candidates recruited by democratic parties? How do the qualities of candidates influence in turn the party, parliamentary, and governmental positions they receive upon winning election? Do political parties tailor their personnel strategies differently in different types of electoral systems and if so, how? These are the core questions of this project. Political scientists have long and deeply studied electoral systems, political parties, and legislative organization. However, they have rarely looked at the way that voters? and politicians? political behavior, the type of candidates parties choose to run for office, and the party, legislative, and governmental positions they get after being elected are systematically related, and almost never examined these cross-nationally. This project fills that gap.
Generally, there are two types of electoral systems, one type (we call the "nominal" type; for e.g., the single seat districts of the U.S. and U.K.) in which seats are allocated solely based on votes cast for candidates, and the other the list proportional representation type in which seats are first allocated to parties based on votes cast for lists, and only thereafter to candidates nominated on those lists (e.g. Portugal). These two types of electoral systems create very different incentives for political parties. For example, the nominal type has candidates running as individuals in geographically concentrated districts whereas the PR type has candidates running as partisan "teams" in relatively more dispersed constituencies. In our research, we ask whether these divergent party incentives result in different types of candidates being nominated and different career patterns for elected representatives.
In the 1990s, several countries reformed their electoral systems, often to a mixed or hybrid system of both types although the nominal or list side could be dominant. These changes provide us with the opportunity to isolate the effect of the electoral system on party personnel strategies from various other possible causes. In order to come close to a ?controlled experiment? we analyze eight countries. Four (Japan, New Zealand, Ukraine, and Bolivia) changed their electoral system in the 1990s, some to more nominally-weighted and some to more proportionally weighted systems. Four other countries did not change their systems: U.K. (nominal), Portugal (list), Lithuania (nominal-leaning mixed), and Germany (mixed proportional). Comparing cases of system change with those with no change thus allow us to compare the actual effects of electoral reform on the type of personnel that parties choose to run as candidates and the post-election assignment to important positions. To do this, we construct large statistical databases in each country of party candidates and representatives? posts before and after electoral reform in the change cases, and a sample of the candidates and officials during the same time period for the non-change cases. These databases in these eight countries are an invaluable resource for future researchers studying electoral systems, elections, and legislative structures.
This project helps us understand how electoral systems influence representation: who is chosen to be a candidate and how they represent the voters after election. The extent to which different electoral systems and types of candidates result in different types of political careers for representatives tells us much about how democratic publics are represented in policy-making institutions. In turn these findings helps us understand more about policy variations across countries and across time, the role of interests groups in representation and policy-making, and other issues of central concern to the performance of democratic political systems.
