
Electoral System Incentives for Interparty and Intraparty Politics
Oxford University Press
Published on 12. June 2025
Book
Hardback
320 pages
978-0-19-895655-6 (ISBN)
Description
Electoral systems are sets of formal rules that create incentives for strategic behavior on the part of voters, (pre-) candidates, party elites, and elected representatives, including legislators and their chamber leaders. Most simply, they translate the choices made by voters into seats won by candidates and parties. In the process, rules influence both how many and which parties are viable and how elected official will go about their time in office as representatives. All electoral systems share a common set of component rules and each rule can take on a number of different values. When combining the values taken by these rules into a system, the number of possible combinations is quite large, which means that specific systems have the potential to provide precise, targeted incentives that govern relationships between political parties - interparty politics - and within parties - intraparty politics.
Using novel computational tools and a comprehensive and updated dataset on electoral systems, this book develops precise and transparent measures of both electoral systems' interparty and intraparty incentives. These two simple quantities capture the extent to which a given system encourages the election of a limited number of large parties or a larger number of relatively smaller ones and the extent to which the lawmaking process will be conducted by unified, programmatic parties or by individually noteworthy politicians. They thus allow scholars to test the extent to which electoral rules shape political outcomes about which we care, and they allow practitioners to select the electoral system that is likely to encourage the form of representation they desire. The book shows that these indicators of electoral system incentives can 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 shape of legislative institutions, levels of party discipline, and the balance struck between programmatic policy and pork barrel politics.
Comparative Politics is a series for researchers, teachers, and students of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterized by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu .
The series is edited by Nicole Bolleyer, Chair of Comparative Political Science, Geschwister Scholl Institut, LMU Munich and Jonathan Slapin, Professor of Political Institutions and European Politics, Department of Political Science, University of Zurich.
Using novel computational tools and a comprehensive and updated dataset on electoral systems, this book develops precise and transparent measures of both electoral systems' interparty and intraparty incentives. These two simple quantities capture the extent to which a given system encourages the election of a limited number of large parties or a larger number of relatively smaller ones and the extent to which the lawmaking process will be conducted by unified, programmatic parties or by individually noteworthy politicians. They thus allow scholars to test the extent to which electoral rules shape political outcomes about which we care, and they allow practitioners to select the electoral system that is likely to encourage the form of representation they desire. The book shows that these indicators of electoral system incentives can 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 shape of legislative institutions, levels of party discipline, and the balance struck between programmatic policy and pork barrel politics.
Comparative Politics is a series for researchers, teachers, and students of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterized by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu .
The series is edited by Nicole Bolleyer, Chair of Comparative Political Science, Geschwister Scholl Institut, LMU Munich and Jonathan Slapin, Professor of Political Institutions and European Politics, Department of Political Science, University of Zurich.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 236 mm
Width: 165 mm
Thickness: 24 mm
Weight
649 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-895655-6 (9780198956556)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Brian F. Crisp is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. His work on electoral systems, legislative politics, interbranch relations, and policy choices has been published in The American Journal of Political Science, The American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, and elsewhere.
Patrick Cunha Silva is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Loyola University Chicago. His research interests focus on representation and electoral politics. His work has been published in The Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and Political Behavior, among others.
Santiago Olivella is an Associate Professor in Political Science and of Data Science and Society at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Olivella has published work in a variety of journals, including the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Political Analysis, and Electoral Studies, and has contributed open-source software for quantitative research.
Guillermo Rosas is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on the economic consequences of political regimes and on the effects of political institutions on political elite behavior, especially in Latin America, and has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and Comparative Political Studies, among others.
Patrick Cunha Silva is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Loyola University Chicago. His research interests focus on representation and electoral politics. His work has been published in The Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and Political Behavior, among others.
Santiago Olivella is an Associate Professor in Political Science and of Data Science and Society at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Olivella has published work in a variety of journals, including the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Political Analysis, and Electoral Studies, and has contributed open-source software for quantitative research.
Guillermo Rosas is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on the economic consequences of political regimes and on the effects of political institutions on political elite behavior, especially in Latin America, and has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and Comparative Political Studies, among others.
Author
Professor Emeritus, Department of Political ScienceProfessor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis
Assistant Professor, Department of Political ScienceAssistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Loyola University Chicago
Associate ProfessorAssociate Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Professor of Political ScienceProfessor of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis
Content
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Abbreviations
Part I The Rules of the Game
1: Party Politics
2: Electoral Rules
3: Electoral Systems
Part II Incentives in the I-I Space
4: Simulating the Effect of Electoral System Incentives
5: Component Rules and Interparty and Intraparty Incentives
6: Placing "Real-World" Electoral Systems in the I-I Space
Part III Interparty Politics
7: The Size of the Party System
8: The Distribution of Partisan Ideological Locations
9: Congruence
Part IV Intraparty Politics
10: Campaigns for Office
11: Constituency Service
12: Committee Systems and Assignments
13: Party Unity
14: Programmatic Policy or Pork Barrel
Part V Conclusion
15: Electing to Simulate
Appendices
Appendix A: Examples of Seat Allocation Formulas in Proportional Representation Systems
Appendix B: Alternative Electoral System Names
Appendix C: Gradient-Boosted Machine Models: The Fine Print
C.1: Predicting {tde
C.2: Predicting {ap
C.3: Coding real electoral systems
Appendix D: Measures of Unity Based on Network Eigendecomposition
Appendix E: Data Sources
Bibliography
Index
List of Tables
List of Abbreviations
Part I The Rules of the Game
1: Party Politics
2: Electoral Rules
3: Electoral Systems
Part II Incentives in the I-I Space
4: Simulating the Effect of Electoral System Incentives
5: Component Rules and Interparty and Intraparty Incentives
6: Placing "Real-World" Electoral Systems in the I-I Space
Part III Interparty Politics
7: The Size of the Party System
8: The Distribution of Partisan Ideological Locations
9: Congruence
Part IV Intraparty Politics
10: Campaigns for Office
11: Constituency Service
12: Committee Systems and Assignments
13: Party Unity
14: Programmatic Policy or Pork Barrel
Part V Conclusion
15: Electing to Simulate
Appendices
Appendix A: Examples of Seat Allocation Formulas in Proportional Representation Systems
Appendix B: Alternative Electoral System Names
Appendix C: Gradient-Boosted Machine Models: The Fine Print
C.1: Predicting {tde
C.2: Predicting {ap
C.3: Coding real electoral systems
Appendix D: Measures of Unity Based on Network Eigendecomposition
Appendix E: Data Sources
Bibliography
Index