Proportional representation (PR) systems—especially closed-list PR—tend to have a higher share of women in politics than majoritarian systems, yet progress toward gender parity has been slow and uneven. This study examines whether single-occupant offices that function as career stepping stones create hidden majoritarian barriers to women's advancement.
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.
How do different types of MPs in mixed-member proportional systems signal territorial ties in public communication? This study examines whether directly elected (district) MPs and list MPs in Germany differ in the geographic focus of their social-media posts, introducing a two-dimensional measure that captures both how local referenced places are and how deprived those places are. The paper combines computational place extraction with deprivation linkage to compare the self-presentation of all members of the 19th German Bundestag on Twitter and Facebook.
This study leverages an early twentieth-century Argentine electoral reform that was applied unevenly across districts, producing a rare setting where some districts oscillated between electoral systems across elections. That asymmetric implementation creates a natural experiment for assessing whether more proportional rules affect voter turnout.
Electoral competition is central across political science, yet there is no consensus on how to measure it at the district level across different electoral systems. Comparisons across single-member and multimember systems are especially sensitive to measurement choices.
This study examines how electoral rules influence government composition in established democracies.
Argentina provides unique insights into the impact of district magnitude on elections. Between 1985 and 2015, two natural experiments occurred when a lottery determined whether provinces elected their congressional representatives in odd or even numbers during midterms versus concurrently.
This article examines a crucial tension in political representation. While proportional electoral systems excel at capturing diverse public policy preferences, they may simultaneously harm the quality of selected legislators.
In proportional representation (PR) systems with districts, voters across different district types experience varying levels of representational equality.
What happens when open-list proportional representation elections replace closed-list ones? This article reveals that parties with internal disagreement on key issues may benefit. Under a closed system, voters tend to support unified parties; however, with open lists allowing candidate selection by voters, specific candidates within divided parties can attract supporters.
World democracies feature diverse legislative and executive institutions. These differences create varied power distribution systems post-elections.
This approach uses multilevel modeling and post-stratification to estimate how legislative outcomes would change under alternative representation rules. The method can simulate scenarios that, for example, boost the share of women in a legislature or change how votes translate into seats.