Collaborative Research: Electoral Systems as Incentive Structures for Interparty and Intraparty Politics

Why does the nature of representation vary across countries, states, and localities? Despite the fact that most politicians work hard to prove they deserve re-election, citizens often express frustration with the behavior of their elected officials. This project develops a new data set based on at least 2750 elections for national legislatures in nearly 150 countries for a 75-year period.

The data will be used to test to what extent the type of representation citizens receive is a function of the electoral rules used to choose their representatives. Specifically, the project examines whether electoral rules explain variation in interparty politics — the number of parties and the variety of the policies they promise — and intraparty politics — the balance representatives strike between offering their constituents programmatic policy or particularistic rewards and constituency service.

This project tests whether electoral rules explain variation in interparty politics — the effective number of parties, parties’ locations in the policy space, congruence between citizens’ preferences and policy — and intraparty politics — the content of campaigns, the amount of constituency service provided, the design of legislative institutions, levels of party discipline, and the balance struck between programmatic policy and pork barrel politics. The effort is unique in two ways.

First, the project compiles a dataset with the details of the systems used to conduct more than 2,750 elections for national legislatures in nearly 150 countries for a 75-year-period. Second, it uses simulations to transparently generate interval-level indicators of the extent to which , on the interparty dimension, electoral systems encourage voters to express their heterogeneous preferences for a wide array of offerings and, on the intraparty front, allow voters to fill legislatures with noteworthy individuals as opposed to party automatons.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.