political science(london)

Chapter 4: How electoral systems shape political behaviour

likely to win seats than small parties. Maurice Duverger (1951) was the first political scientist to identify why this was the case. He argued that electoral systems have two effects:

1.Mechanical – how the rules of the electoral system translate votes into seats.

2.Psychological – how the electoral system shapes voters’ expectations about which parties are likely to win seats.

In a majoritarian system, for example, a candidate usually has to win at least 40 per cent of the votes in a constituency to win a seat. The mechanical effect of this is that only large parties are likely to win any seats. And, the psychological effect is that, realising this, citizens will decide not to waste their votes on small parties and only vote for big

parties. So, in Figure 4.2, in a majoritarian system small parties are likely to win a smaller proportion of seats than their vote-share, whereas parties with more than 40 per cent of the votes are likely to win a far larger proportion of seats than their vote-share. Duverger consequently argued that pure majoritarian systems, with simple-plurality in single-member districts, should produce a two-party system (as was the case in the UK when he was writing), whereas a proportional electoral system should produce a multi-party system. This became known as ‘Duverger’s Law’.

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Figure 4.2: The seats-votes curve: proportionality or responsiveness?

By punishing small parties and rewarding big parties, majoritarian electoral systems tend to produce single-party governments, and so tend to have more accountable governments and a higher clarity-of-responsibility than do proportional electoral systems. On the other hand, parliaments in majoritarian systems can be highly unrepresentative, especially if a large proportion of the electorate votes for a smaller party.

Consider the case of the majoritarian single-member plurality electoral system in the UK, for example. In 1992, the Conservative Party won 41.9 per cent of the vote, against Labour’s 34.4 per cent and the Liberal Democrats’ 17.8 per cent. These vote-shares translated into 51.7 per cent

of the seats in the House of Commons for the Conservatives, 41.6 per cent

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for Labour and 3.1 per cent for the Liberal Democrats. In other words, in 1992, the electoral system produced a significant bonus in terms of seatshares for the largest party, a small bonus for the second largest party, while significantly penalising the third largest party.

The 1997 election saw a swing in votes from the Conservatives to Labour, which produced a massive shift in seats between these two parties. In terms of vote-shares, Labour won 43.2 per cent, the Conservatives 30.7 per cent and the Liberal Democrats 16.8 per cent. And this translated into 63.4 per cent of the seats in the Commons for Labour, 25.0 per cent for the Conservatives, and 6.9 per cent for the Liberal Democrats. So, an approximately 10 per cent shift in votes from the Conservatives to Labour produced more than a 20 per cent shift in seats, as Labour emerged as the

largest party in a clear majority of the single-member constituencies across the country.

On the one hand, the British electoral system had translated a swing between the two parties into a decisive outcome, where a single party could govern on the basis of its electoral manifesto and then be rewarded or punished in the next election on the basis of its performance in office. On the other hand, the outcomes of the 1992 and 1997 elections were not very ‘representative’. Neither the Conservative party in 1992 nor the Labour party in 1997 won a majority of votes. Put another way, a majority of people voted for parties to the left of the government that formed in 1992 and for parties to the right of the government that formed in 1997. So, the two governing parties did not have a clear electoral mandate in either election. Moreover, a large number of people voted for smaller parties, such as the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, the UK Independence Party, the Scottish National Party (SNP), and Plaid Cymru (the Welsh nationalists), who won far fewer seats in the House of Commons than they deserved given their vote-shares in the election.

The problem for the British electoral system is that Britain no longer has a single national party system. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Conservative and Labour parties were the top two parties in more than 90 per cent of constituencies. This produced highly representative parliaments (in terms of the relationship between vote-shares and seat-shares) as well as single-

party governments. However, since the early 1980s, different voting patterns have emerged in different parts of the country, so much so that in the 2010 election the Conservative and Labour parties were the two largest parties

in only 44 per cent of constituencies. The other constituencies were either Conservatives versus Liberal Democrats, or Labour versus Liberal Democrats, or Labour versus SNP, or Labour versus Plaid, or Conservatives versus Plaid, or Greens versus Labour, or several three-party races, or even a few fourparty battles.

The problem, which Gary Cox (1997) pointed out, is that Duverger’s logic only works at the constituency level, but not at the national level. So, if voters are strategic, then they should ‘coordinate’ around only those parties that have a realistic chance of being elected in each electoral district. So, in a single-member district, voters should focus on the battle between the top two parties. But, this does not mean that the top two parties will be the same in every district in a country. In fact, in geographically heterogeneous societies, such as Canada and now the UK, a single-member district majoritarian system will produce a multi-party system (with coalition governments) and not a two-party system (with single-party governments).

The problem for Britain, then, is that with the current geographical fragmentation of the vote, the electoral system is unlikely to produce

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Chapter 4: How electoral systems shape political behaviour

decisive outcomes. This is exactly what happened in the 2010 election, which led to a coalition government between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. In fact, in 2010, the British majoritarian electoral system did not produce either a representative parliament or an accountable (single-party) government!

4.2.2 Accountable politicians versus cohesive parties

The second trade-off in the design of electoral systems relates to how the electoral system shapes the relationship between individual politicians and their parties. This trade-off has been less researched than the trade-off between representation and accountability, but has nonetheless received a lot of attention from political scientists in the last 10 years or so.

John Carey and Matthew Shugart (1995) were some of the earliest political scientists to look at the relationship between the ‘ballot structure’ and the incentives for individual politicians to respond primarily to

their voters or primarily to their party leaders. Their framework can be summarised as follows. At one extreme are CLPR systems, which allow parties a lot of control over individual politicians, as party leaders are usually responsible for deciding the order of the candidates on the party lists, and because voters can only choose between parties in these ‘closed’ systems, there are no incentives for candidates from the same party to differentiate themselves from each other; for example, by campaigning on their own personal performance or policy positions rather than the policy positions of their party. CLPR systems consequently produce highly cohesive parties with no direct accountability of individual politicians to voters.

Next on the list are the MMP and MMM systems. In these systems, parties usually control who stands as a candidate in the single-member districts and also the order of the names on the multi-member party lists. These systems do, however, provide some incentives for the candidates in the single-member constituencies to campaign on their personal records. Nevertheless, as parties only stand one candidate each in the singlemember districts, voters do not have a choice between candidates from the same political party.

This is exactly the same in the single-member district systems – with either SMP, the TRS or the AV. In these systems, individual politicians can campaign on their personal policy positions and performance and may receive an electoral boost over and above the level of their party’s performance in an election. However, as with the single-member districts in mixed-member systems, since parties only stand one candidate in each

district, in these systems voters are not able to choose between politicians from the same political party. For example, if a voter likes a particular party but does not like the candidate from that party in her district, she faces a unpalatable choice: between voting for a better candidate from

a less-preferred party, or voting for a worse candidate from her mostpreferred party. Hence, single-member district elections, as in the UK, do not provide very strong individual political accountability.

At the other extreme to the CLPR systems are the ‘preferential’ voting systems: OLPR and STV. In these systems, parties present several candidates to the voters, and voters can choose between candidates from the same party. This forces candidates to campaign directly to voters

on their personal records, and also to differentiate themselves from each other. This makes elected politicians individually accountable. For example, Simon Hix and Sara Hagemann (2009) find that in European Parliament elections, citizens who live in countries that use OLPR or STV

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for these elections (such as Finland or Ireland) are much more likely to be contacted by individual politicians in the election campaigns than citizens who live in countries that use CLPR systems (such as Germany, France or the UK).

Nevertheless, parties tend to dislike these preferential voting systems, as they weaken the ability of parties to present a single coherent message to the voters and then to act cohesively in parliament to implement their electoral promises. Under OLPR or STV, party leaders have less power

over their ‘backbenchers’ in parliament than they do under CLPR, because they cannot threaten to move politicians down the party list at the next election if they vote against the party in the parliament. As a result, John Carey (2007) finds that parties in countries who use preferential electoral systems (OLPR or STV) tend to be less cohesive in their parliamentary voting behaviour than parties in countries that have single-member district or closed-list PR electoral systems.

So, once again, there is a trade-off: CLPR systems allow parties to deliver on their electoral promises but do not allow voters to hold individual candidates to account; OLPR and STV allow voters to hold individual candidates to account but undermine cohesive parties; and single-member district systems (SMP, TRS and AV) and mixed-member systems (MMP and

MMM) are somewhere between these two extremes.

4.2.3Is there a ‘best of both worlds’?

In general, then, most political scientists see the design of electoral systems as essentially a trade-off between different ‘visions’ or ‘models’ of democracy, with no way of reconciling competing objectives (for example, Lijphart, 1999; Bingham-Powell, 2000). Nevertheless, not all

political scientists have this view, and in many new democracies and some established democracies constitutional engineers have attempted to design electoral systems which achieve several allegedly contradictory goals, in an effort to achieve ‘the best of both worlds’.

Majoritarian systems

(e.g. UK, Australia, France)

“Modified” Proportional systems

(e.g. Germany, Spain, Chile, Denmark)

Government

Accountability

Pure Proportional systems

(e.g. Netherlands, Israel)

Representative Parliament

Figure 4.3: A maximisation problem in the design of electoral systems.

For example, Carey and Hix (2011) argue that the trade-off between a representative parliament and an accountable government might not be as linear as previous scholars thought. Their argument is illustrated in Figure 4.3. It may be the case that majoritarian systems (as in the UK, Australia and France) maximise government accountability at the expense of leading to unrepresentative parliaments, while pure PR systems (as in the Netherlands or Israel) maximise the representativeness of parliament

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yet lead to unwieldy and perhaps unaccountable coalition governments. However, these are rare ideal types. Many countries these days have a form of ‘modified’ PR, which tries to strike a compromise between these two systems. Such modifications include:

1.small multi-member districts, which provide a seat-boost for larger parties yet allow medium-sized parties or geographically concentrated parties to win some seats (as in Denmark, Spain, Portugal or the Czech Republic)

2.a high electoral threshold, such as a 5 per cent minimum to win a seat, which prevents very small parties from winning seats and so makes coalition formation easier (as in Germany, Sweden, Hungary and Turkey)

3.a ‘winner’s bonus’, which provides extra seats to the largest party or parties in the election, to provide incentives for voters to coordinate on the largest parties and for parties to try to win a majority of seats and so form a single-party government (as in Greece and Italy, since 2006)

4.MMM systems, which provide a significant boost for large parties, who can win many of the single-member district seats, while allowing smaller parties to win some seats from the multi-member party-list tier (as in Japan, South Korea or Taiwan).

The result, as the figure illustrates, is that the trade-off between a representative parliament and an accountable government might in fact be a maximisation problem, where there is an optimal ‘sweet spot’ design which allows for a reasonably representative parliament as well as a singleparty government or a coalition government with only two parties (which is easier to hold to account than a coalition of three or more parties).

Similar claims have been made about the other trade-off: between cohesive parties and accountable politicians. In particular, many new democracies in the 1990s choose mixed-member systems (Shugart and Wattenberg, 2001). Mixed-systems, either MMP or MMM, allow for a strong personal link to local communities for the politicians elected in the single-member districts, as well as reasonable cohesive political parties, via party control of the candidates on the party-lists.

Nevertheless, since the introduction of mixed-member systems in several new democracies in the 1990s, there is growing evidence that these systems lead to increased fragmentation of the party system because large numbers of voters decide to use their two votes to support two different parties, which boosts support for many small parties (Ferrara et al., 2005). This has been less of a problem in MMM systems, which have tended to produce single-party governments, but has led to coalition governments with a large number of parties in some countries with MMP systems (as was the case in Italy before its MMP system was replaced in 2006).

4.3 Conclusion

Electoral systems have an impact on many aspects of democratic politics, from voting behaviour in elections, to how politicians and parties behave, to how representative parliaments are, to how many parties there are in government, and ultimately to the types of policies parties promise and governments produce. There are two main trade-offs in the design of electoral systems. First, proportional systems produce highly representative parliaments but they tend to produce less accountable governments; whereas majoritarian systems tend to produce opposite

effects. In some instances, a high degree of inclusion may take precedence

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over accountability, while in other instances it may be the reverse. For example, it has been argued that in the Arab Spring countries their new electoral system must prioritise inclusion because of the historically high degree of exclusion of certain viewpoints from the political process in these former authoritarian regimes (Carey and Reynolds, 2011). Second, whereas CLPR systems tend to produce highly-cohesive parties but less accountable politicians, OLPR systems tend to produce the opposite. However, leaving the Arab Spring countries aside for one moment, there is a definite trend in recent years for electoral system ‘engineers’ in new democracies and some established democracies (such as Italy, New

Zealand and Japan) to attempt to design systems that achieve ‘the best of both worlds’.

4.4 A reminder of your learning outcomes

Having completed this chapter, and the Essential reading and activities, you should be able to:

•explain the difference between majoritarian, proportional and mixed electoral systems

•discuss the main political consequences of the type of electoral system used in a democracy

•evaluate critically why some electoral systems are better than others in terms of achieving certain political outcomes, such as fair

representation, accountable government, accountable politicians, and cohesive political parties

•discuss how some electoral systems are able to combine ‘the best of both’ worlds in terms of political outcomes.

4.5Sample examination questions

1.‘Proportional electoral systems produce more representative parliaments but less accountable governments than majoritarian electoral systems.’ Discuss.

2.How does the electoral system influence the relationship between individual politicians and their party leaders?

3.Is a proportional or a majoritarian electoral system better?

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