Annie Laurent

Proximity, Candidates, and Presidential Power: How Directly Elected Presidents Shape the Legislative Party System

We examine the impact of direct presidential elections on legislative party systems. We argue that presidential power (PRESPOW) shapes the effective number of presidential candidates in a way that has a reductive effect on the legislative party system within an intermediary range of PRESPOW. We also argue that this proposition should be tested solely on the population of countries with direct presidential elections. We find that the effect of presidential coattails is less important than has typically been suggested and that we need to think carefully about how to capture variation in PRESPOW when trying to estimate its effect.

Election Timing and Party System Fragmentation: A Constituency Level Analysis of the 1967-2012 French Legislative Elections

Due to changes in laws affecting the duration of presidential terms and the timing of legislative and presidential elections, the timing of the French legislative elections relative to presidential elections in that country offers something akin to a natural experiment that allows us to examine election timing effects on the legislative vote fragmentation. To address this issue, we turn to district specific within - French aggregate data since 1965. Our country-specific findings show that there is lower legislative party fragmentation at the constituency level (effective number of parties according to the Laakso-Taagepera index) in the first round of sequential than in non-sequential elections. French political landscape is mainly structured around two political blocks, the left and the right blocks due to the two-round system used both for presidential and legislative elections. We argue that this reduced constituency party fragmentation in sequential elections occurs because of two voters’ surges from presidential to legislative elections: the first playing in favor of the locally best placed party that belongs to the new President’s political block (left or right according the period) to give him/her a clear majority, the second surge playing in favor of the locally best placed party that is member of the block opposed to the new President (left or right), to help create a stronger opposition. After first presenting simple bivariate comparisons showing lower fragmentation in sequential elections, we offer a logistic regression model of legislative party concentration that control for other factors, e.g., changes in party finance laws that affect incentives for party formation. In our model we continue find sequential elections to have a defractionalizing effect as compared to non-sequential elections. Thus, we would argue that election timing should be considered an important feature of electoral laws.

Measuring Duvergerian Effects of the French Majority Runoff System with Laboratory Experiments: Duverger’s Laws Under the Microscope

The study of the effects of voting systems started before Maurice Duverger, but the credit goes to him for systematizing the analysis (Riker 1986) and for stating firmly the “laws”, which are still used by contemporary political scientists to describe the relationships between election rules and party system: the plurality system favours bipartism (Duverger 1951, p. 306); the runoff system and proportional representation tend to favour a multiparty system (Duverger 1951, p. 331). He can also be credited for bringing into light the theoretical foundations on which these “laws” are based, by making a clear distinction between the “mechanical effects” of voting systems, i.e., the conversion of votes into seats, and the “psychological effects” of voting systems, i.e., the tendency of voters to anticipate the mechanical effects of electoral rules and to adapt their behaviours to the chances of winning of the various parties running, to maximize the utility of their votes (Duverger 1951, p. 315). In this case, we talk about “strategic voting” (Downs 1957; Cain 1978; Cox 1994, 1997) of “sophisticated voting” (Banks 1985; Shepsle and Weingast 1984; Abramson et al. 1992) or even of “tactical voting” (Johnston and Pattie 1991; Niemi et al. 1992) or, in France, of “vote utile” (Parodi 2002).

Editors’ Introduction: The Role of Controlled Experiments in Evaluating Proposed Institutional Reforms

In the modern era, representation is the hallmark of democracy, and electoral rules structure how representation works and how effectively governments perform. Moreover, of the key structural variables in constitutional design, it is the choice of electoral system that is usually the most open to change.

La victoire sans reliefs du « oui »

Dolez Bernard, Laurent Annie. La victoire sans reliefs du « oui ». In: Revue francaise de science politique, 51ᵉ annee, n°1-2, 2001. pp. 233-240.