This paper asks whether and how electoral rules affect politicians’ incentives to pursue programmatic redistribution, exploiting France’s switch to—and later abandonment of—proportional representation in the interwar period. Using new data on deputies’ legislative initiatives and manifesto commitments, the authors compare the same politicians under different electoral rules to isolate how open-list PR versus single-member majoritarian rules related to programmatic effort in both parliamentary behavior and campaigning. The contribution is a within-politician comparison that tests whether open-list PR reduced programmatic redistribution relative to majoritarian rules, and situates the results in dialogue with both economic and political-science theories of electoral systems.
Within-politician comparison design New data on initiatives and manifestos Focus on open-list PR versus single-member majoritarian
Data and methods
The study draws on novel data linking members of France’s Chamber of Deputies to their legislative initiatives and manifesto commitments during the interwar period, and compares politicians against themselves across periods with different electoral rules. The abstract indicates a research design that leverages variation in electoral institutions over time to assess changes in behavior; standard panel and fixed-effects approaches are implied by the within-politician comparison.
Main findings
According to the abstract, politicians devoted more effort to programmatic redistribution under France’s single-member majoritarian system than under the open-list proportional rule, both in parliament and while campaigning. The authors say these results contrast with canonical economic models emphasizing PR’s redistributive advantages and instead align with political-science accounts that link open-list PR to personalized, non-programmatic competition.
- The effect is reported for both parliamentary initiatives and campaign manifestos.
- The authors emphasize variation among PR institutions and caution against a simple PR vs. single-member dichotomy.
