This comparative study of electoral procedures, trends, and key issues is the first to deal with the representation of women and minorities around the world. Wilma Rule and Joseph Zimmerman have brought together an international team of scholars who show why there is gross underrepresentation of women and minorities internationally and who analyze the cultural, socio-economic, and political barriers to their future electoral successes. The scholars describe the current situation in 20 countries in various regions and point to ways for women and minorities to enhance positions politically. This text is intended for courses in comparative politics, political parties and elections, women in politics, and minority politics.

This book offers the first comprehensive, comparative and coherent perspective on parliamentary candidates in contemporary representative democracy. Based on the unique database of the ‘Comparative Candidate Survey' project which interrogated parliamentary candidates in more than 30 countries, it fills a significant lacuna by focusing on the thousands of ordinary candidates that participate in national elections. It examines who the candidates are in terms of their socio-demographic background and political career patterns, how they were selected by their parties, what their policy preference are and whether these are congruent to those held by their voters, who they seek to represent and how they intend to do so once elected, and what their visions are on representative democracy and party government. Last but not least, it investigates how they go about reaching out to their potential voters during the election campaign. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of political parties and party politics, political elites, political communication, political participation, elections, theories of democracy and representation, legislative studies, voting behaviour and more broadly to European politics, as well as to political and policy professionals throughout Europe.

Money in essential for electoral politics yet its use and abuse often raises problems of graft, corruption, and cronyism. To throw new light on these challenges, this book addresses three questions: what types of public policies are commonly used around the world to regulate the role of money in politics? What triggers landmark reforms in political finance? And, 'what works, ' what fails, and why - when countries reform regulations? Checkbook Elections? compares a diverse range of affluent societies and long-established democracies such as Sweden, Britain and the United States, as well as emerging economies such as Russia, South Africa, India, and Brazil

This book is a cross-national analysis of the role of the Internet in elections. It examines the role of context in shaping candidate and party usage of the Internet in democratic electoral systems.

This book examines candidate selection in nine liberal democracies -- Belgium, Britain, France, West Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and Norway. It describes the methods by which parties select their candidates; analyses the factors which influence the form of selection used; and considers the consequences of candidate selection. The book concludes with an overall assessment of the role of candidate selection in the political process. It questions whether proportional representation necessarily entails centralized candidate selection; whether parties of the Left tend to be more centralized than parties of the Right; and whether different types of candidate selection have distinct consequences for the behaviour of deputies.

Most studies of electoral system effects tend to ignore the characteristics of parties in the causal chain. Yet, this dissertation argues that different party structures, when interacting with electoral systems, lead to different levels of party system fragmentation. In a weak party structure, elite action is the key to explaining the different outcomes: a permissive electoral system tends to inflate the number of parties because the rule poses an obstacle to elites' electoral coordination. But this major obstacle is removed under a restrictive rule, which results in lower fragmentation. By contrast, the role of voters becomes active in a strong party structure; therefore, the effects of permissive and restrictive electoral systems become similar as both tend to bring down the number of parties through voters' strategic behavior. This dissertation tests the theory on Thailand since the country has gone through three waves of electoral reform in which the electoral system has been changed between a permissive and a restrictive electoral rule. At the same time, the party structure has changed following the victory of the Thai Rak Thai Party in the 2001 election. The changing interactions of party structures and electoral systems provide a quasiexperimental setting conducive to inspecting the effects of the key factors on party system fragmentation while other confounding variables (social heterogeneity and viii political institutions) are held constant. This research design allows me to compare periods of time in different configurations of party system fragmentation. This dissertation applied multi-methods, including case study analysis, single-country multilevel quantitative analysis, and a large N, cross-national quantitative analysis, to reach the conclusions. Theoretically, the findings suggest that electoral system effects are contingent on party structures. Successful institutional engineering requires deep understanding of both formal rules and the political context of a particular country. In other words, one size cannot fit all, even for the same country at different times.

From Kosovo to Kabul, the last decade witnessed growing interest in ?electoral engineering?. Reformers have sought to achieve either greater government accountability through majoritarian arrangements or wider parliamentary diversity through proportional formula. Underlying the normative debates are important claims about the impact and consequences of electoral reform for political representation and voting behavior. The study compares and evaluates two broad schools of thought, each offering contracting expectations. One popular approach claims that formal rules define electoral incentives facing parties, politicians and citizens. By changing these rules, rational choice institutionalism claims that we have the capacity to shape political behavior. Alternative cultural modernization theories differ in their emphasis on the primary motors driving human behavior, their expectations about the pace of change, and also their assumptions about the ability of formal institutional rules to alter, rather than adapt to, deeply embedded and habitual social norms and patterns of human behavior.

No subject is more central to the study of politics than elections. All across the globe, elections are a focal point for citizens, the media, and politicians long before--and sometimes long after--they occur. Electoral systems, the rules about how voters' preferences are translated into election results, profoundly shape the results not only of individual elections but also of many other important political outcomes, including party systems, candidate selection, and policy choices. Electoral systems have been a hot topic in established democracies from the UK and Italy to New Zealand and Japan. Even in the United States, events like the 2016 presidential election and court decisions such as Citizens United have sparked advocates to promote change in the Electoral College, redistricting, and campaign-finance rules. Elections and electoral systems have also intensified as a field of academic study, with groundbreaking work over the past decade sharpening our understanding of how electoral systems fundamentally shape the connections among citizens, government, and policy. This volume provides an in-depth exploration of the origins and effects of electoral systems.

Electoral systems matter. They are a crucial link in the chain connecting the preferences of citizens to the policy choices made by governments. They are chosen by political actors and, once in existence, have political consequences for those actors. They are an important object of study for anyone interested in the political process, and in this book we subject them to systematic analysis. In addition to some comparative chapters, the book contains full accounts of the operation of electoral systems in 22 countries: France, the UK, Germany, Italy, Israel, Spain, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, The Netherlands, Ireland, Hungary, Russia, Australia, Canada, India, the USA, Japan, New Zealand, Chile, and South Africa. The book provides detailed analyses of the operation of a diverse set of electoral systems in their national context. Each chapter explains how the electoral system really works in the given country, examining the strategic incentives the system provides to voters, candidates, and parties. All country chapters have a common format and structure. Successive sections analyse: the institutional context; how each electoral system was chosen historically; how the current electoral system operates (the rules, mechanics, and ballot structure); and the political consequences of the current system (the impact on the party system, the internal life of parties, and the impact on parliament and government formation). Each country chapter then contains a final section which focuses on the politicization of electoral institutions. In recent years many countries have changed their electoral systems, either entirely or in part so there is a strong focus on the processes of electoral reform, both historically and prospectively. The book concentrates on the real world 'politics', as well as the 'political science' of electoral systems. The book will be of interest to those concerned with the practical political business of electoral reform. The book contains a wealth of evidence about the performance of various kinds of proportional representation and of non-PR systems. This will be invaluable for anyone interested in the question: 'What would be the best electoral system for my country?'