Comparative Study of Electoral Systems

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.

Populism increases affective polarization not only among its supporters but also among non-supporters. The effect on non-supporters grows as the level of populism in a country increases, producing a two-way dynamic: partisan identity tied to populist parties heightens interpersonal animosity, and rising national populism amplifies polarization across the electorate.

This study asks how parties in presidential systems choose vice-presidential running mates and what trade-offs those choices reflect. It introduces a Vice-Presidential Candidate Profile Index (VPCPI) to characterize running-mate selections and uses that index to assess selection strategies in Brazil after redemocratization. The central contribution is a descriptive tool (the VPCPI) and an empirical application that evaluates whether tickets pick successors mainly to win votes, to improve governing capacity, or to do both.