Airo Hino

The Mechanical and Psychological Effects of Electoral Systems A Quasi-Experimental Study

Having two votes for the same election or two simultaneous elections with different electoral systems provides a golden opportunity to ascertain the impact of the electoral system and to sort out the relative magnitude of mechanical and psychological effects on parties and voters. The authors propose a new methodology for estimating such effects and apply that methodology to 13 elections, 9 in Switzerland and 4 in Japan. The authors find mechanical effects to dominate in half of the elections examined, most particularly in the more recent Swiss elections. They discuss the implications of these findings.

Missing Links in Party-System Polarization: How Institutions and Voters Matter

This article aims to understand the determinants of party-system polarization by moving beyond the (almost exclusive) emphasis placed in the literature on the role of the electoral system and the number of parties. We propose a larger menu of explanatory variables that includes both institutional and voters-related factors. Regarding the institutional factors, we highlight the consequences of expectations of coalition formations as well as office-related elections (e.g., Presidential ones) on party-system convergence in legislative elections. For the voters-related factors, we address the importance of specific characteristics of the electorate following insights from the spatial theory of voting. To test our hypotheses, we use survey data covering 33 nations and 67 elections. While hypotheses derived from electoral systems and number of parties find little empirical support, the new variables that we consider involving institutions and voters matter significantly.