Anthony J. McGann

The radical right in the Alps : evolution of support for the Swiss SVP and Austrian FPO

The Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) and the Swiss Peoples Party (SVP) in 1999 became the only far-right parties in post-war Western Europe to outpoll their mainstream conservative competitors. As such, they are limiting cases and yield a great deal of information about the development and prospects for the far-right in Europe. We analyze the evolution and success of these parties, using survey data to track their changing electorates. We find that the FPÖ and SVP have evolved into the typical profile of ‘new radical-right’ parties in terms of their appeal and supporters. However, they have also been able to appeal to a broader electorate, which in part explains their success.

The Logic of Democracy : Reconciling Equality, Deliberation, and Minority Protection

The Logic of Democracy examines some of the broadest questions in political science—what is democracy and how does it work—and provides a unified theory to explain them. McGann brings together the often antagonistic literature on normative political philosophy, social choice, and the empirical study of political institutions to show that it is possible to provide answers for many outstanding problems prevalent in all three.

The Advantages of Ideological Cohesion A Model of Constituency Representation and Electoral Competition in Multi-Party Democracies

This article develops a model of parties in multi-party systems. Instead of treating parties as vote-maximizing candidates able to take any position, parties are assumed to be controlled or at least constrained by their supporters. The model relies on a process whereby supporters sort themselves between parties, as in Aldrich (1983) and the economics literature starting with Tiebout (1956). The results of the model are sensitive to the shape of the preference distribution, particularly its skewness. This can be used to explain how a cohesive minority may have more influence than a more dispersed majority, and why certain parties are systematically advantaged over others.

The Tyranny of the Supermajority How Majority Rule Protects Minorities

This paper demonstrates that majority rule offers more protection to the worst-off minority than any other system, in that it maximizes the ability to overturn an unfavorable outcome. It is known (May 1952, Dahl 1956) that majority rule is the only decision rule that completely respects political equality. However, it is frequently argued that other decision rules (such as system of checks and balances, which are implicitly super-majoritarian) better serve the goals of protecting minorities rights and preserving stability. This paper argues that this trade-off is illusory and that majority rule actually provides most protection to minorities. Furthermore it does so precisely because of the instability inherent in majority rule, which overcomes the problem of majority tyranny.

Congressional Leadership 1965–96: A New Look at the Extremism versus Centrality Debate

An examination of the differences between the ideological positions of leaders and other members in the U.S. House of Representatives (1965-96) demonstrates that Republican leaders tend to be significantly to the right of the median Republican member and Democratic leaders tend to be significantly to the left of the median Democratic member. Furthermore, leaders from both parties tend to be ideologically located near the mode of their partys ideological distribution. These empirical results have implications for issues such as party polarization, conditional party government, and the possibility of separating out party and ideology.

Social choice and comparing legislatures: Constitutional versus institutional constraints

There are two ‘institutionalist’ literatures that seek to explain legislative behaviour. Firstly, there is the macro ‘Patterns of Democracy’ literature that explains outcomes in terms of constitutional constraints. Secondly, there is a micro ‘industrial organisation of legislatures’ literature that explains outcomes in terms of internal legislative rules. I will argue that constitutional rules are powerful constraints on outcomes that can be bargained, while internal rules are endogenous. Neither of these literatures deals with the question of which legislatures are ‘strong’ in the law-making sense. This question, indeed, is misframed, as it makes little sense to treat a legislature as a unitary agent. In particular the common belief that the US Congress is a strong law-making legislature is mistaken.

The Calculus of Consensus Democracy: Rethinking Patterns of Democracy Without Veto Players

We present a theory of comparative political institutions based on the concept of consensus democracy and social choice theory. Unlike Lijphart, we argue that “consensus democracy” is not a special form of democracy characterized by mutual vetoes, but rather the simplest form of democracy, which we refer to as PR-majority rule. We construct a typology of political institutions based on differences with this simple model. Contra Tsebelis’s veto players approach, our theory predicts that PR-majority rule should be the most flexible form of democracy. We test this with data on overall patterns of government spending and on welfare state reform.

Proportional representation within the limits of liberalism alone

This article provides a justification of proportional representation (PR) in strictly liberal terms. Previous justifications of proportional representation have tended to be based either on its intuitive fairness to political parties, or on its being fair to social groups. The arguments of critics of PR, we argue, likewise rely on fairness to group identities. In contrast, our result shows that proportionality is logically implied by liberal equality, that is, by the requirement that all individual voters be treated equally. Thus we provide a justification for PR in terms of the theory of voting, similar to Mays theorem for majority rule.

Measuring Partisan Bias

We claimed in Chapter 1 that there was a sharp increase in partisan bias as a result of the redistricting that followed the 2010 Census. In this and the following two chapters, we provide systematic evidence for this and ask why this has happened. Empirically, we have two main tasks. The first is to measure partisan bias at both the national and state level. This will allow us to test whether there has been a significant increase in partisan bias following the 2010 districting round. This is the task of this chapter. Assuming that there is partisan bias, the second task is to test various explanations of why the level of bias has changed and why bias occurs where it does. We have hypothesized that this is a thoroughly political phenomenon – state governments pursue partisan advantage when they are unconstrained by the courts. However, other explanations are possible. Chapter 4 considers nonpolitical alternative explanations. For example, it has been suggested that bias against the Democratic Party is inevitable because of demographic reasons, such as the fact that Democratic voters are concentrated in urban areas or the fact that it is necessary to draw majority-minority districts to comply with the Voting Rights Act. Chapter 5 considers political explanations for the patterns of bias we see. It asks whether we can explain the bias we observe in terms of the political motivations and capabilities of those in charge of drawing districts. We make use of the established methodology for measuring partisan bias in districting (see Gelman and King 1994b). This has been widely applied, tested, and peer reviewed. It is based on the idea of symmetry: If the Democrats get 52% of the votes and win 60% of the seats as a result, then if the Republicans were to win 52% of the vote in the next election they should get 60% of the seats. We can measure how much a districting plan violates symmetry by estimating how many seats a party would win in the event of different levels of popular support. While popular support varies from election to election, the pattern of support between districts remains quite stable.

Liberal political equality implies proportional representation

This article shows that for a single-vote electoral system for a representative body to treat all voters and all parties equally, it must produce results essentially identical to list proportional representation (PR). Democratic theory has often been agnostic concerning representative institutions. Different institutions have been compared in terms of behavioral outcomes rather than axiomatic properties. Building on van der Hout (Annual meeting of the Public Choice Society, San Diego, 2002) result, we show that for an electoral system to completely respect the principle of liberal political equality and popular sovereignty, its results must be equivalent to those of list PR.