Audrey André

Electoral Systems and Legislators’ Constituency Effort The Mediating Effect of Electoral Vulnerability

In so far as legislators value re-election, electoral institutions are said to shape their strategic behavior. Yet, the empirical evidence linking legislators’ behavior to electoral institutions is weak at best. Previous studies, we argue, have either ignored or misspecified how legislators’ vulnerability to electoral defeat mediates the expected effect of electoral institutions. To test this argument, we develop and operationalize a new comparative measure of electoral vulnerability which we combine with new individual-level data on legislators’ constituency effort in 14 (mostly European) countries. Our data demonstrate that the effect of electoral institutions on constituency effort is different dependent on legislators’ electoral precariousness. In party-centered systems, district magnitude’s negative effect grows weaker among those most vulnerable. In candidate-centered systems, by contrast, district magnitude’s positive effect grows even stronger among those most vulnerable. The results suggest the need to revisit studies focusing exclusively on the impact of institutions on legislators’ constituency-oriented behavior.

It's Not Only About Lists: Explaining Preference Voting in Belgium

This article analyses the decision of Belgian voters to cast a preference vote on the occasion of the 2009 regional elections. And what appears is that preference votes could be given three meanings. First, preference voting appears to be a sophisticated voting behaviour more accessible to politically interested and involved voters. Less politically active voters more often limit themselves to marking their ballot on the top of the list without differentiating their support among candidates. Second, preference voting is very much a token of voter–candidate proximity. Voters are more likely to support candidates when they know one or several specific candidates directly or via the media. Finally, preference voting is also very much dependent on the structure of institutional incentives. The more influence a preference vote has on the process of intra-party seat allocation, the more likely voters are to make the effort. All in all, this article shows the diversity of motivations behind preference voting, and more importantly the different meanings it could take in elections.

District Magnitude and Home Styles of Representation in European Democracies

How political representatives interact with constituents is contingent on the conditions under which they compete for re-election. It has been the assumption that intra-party competition shapes legislators’ incentive to cultivate a personal reputation and thereby the incentive to engage in any constituency-oriented action that reputation may be built on. Using data from the PARTIREP cross-national survey among regional and national legislators in 12 European democracies, the assumption is proven to be inaccurate: focusing on more than one action at a time, it becomes clear that district magnitude increases the time representatives spend on some constituency-oriented actions and decreases the time they spend on others (even when the electoral incentive to nurture a personal reputation is strong). The article demonstrates that representatives’ choice to engage in four constituency-oriented actions is related to the nature of these home styles and their electoral utility in a given context.

Party nomination strategies in flexible-list systems Do preference votes matter?

A paradox in the comparative literature on electoral systems is that one of the most common systems in Europe – flexible-list proportional representation systems – may be the least understood. Any study of flexible-list systems must start by acknowledging a puzzle: why candidates spend time and effort striving to win preference votes when typically these votes make no difference between election and defeat. Offering the first comprehensive multi-country test of this key puzzle, we provide evidence from Belgium, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia that parties will promote to better list ranks in the next election those candidates who are successful at winning preference votes, thereby improving their prospects of election in the longer term and incentivizing them to cultivate personal reputations. Our findings have important implications for party scholars and practitioners when designing, or reforming, political institutions.

Constituency Service in Multi-level Democracies

Abstract What are the patterns of legislator responsiveness to constituents in multi-level democracies, and what explains them? Previously, comparative research has been hampered by a lack of theory and a lack of data. The article first theorizes how constituency service may be explained by conventional arguments, such as electoral motivations and role orientations. It then considers how regionalization specifically might affect service responsiveness. Using data from the PARTIREP survey of legislators in eight multi-level democracies and six unitary democracies, the article demonstrates that national legislators devote less time to constituency service in multi-level than in unitary democracies; and that regional legislators devote more time than national legislators in multi-level democracies. While conventional arguments are important, the specific effects of regionalization are also significant in determining service responsiveness, establishing an agenda for future research of constituency service as a significant area in the study of multi-level democracy.

Legislators’ local roots Disentangling the effect of district magnitude

District magnitude structures the options open to voters and shapes the incentives legislators have to cultivate a personal reputation. But district magnitude can be a proxy of different ‘mechanisms’ tying to the electoral rules the one trait that is capable of attracting a personal vote across a wide range of electoral systems: that is, a legislator’s local roots. For the first time, recent alternative measures regarding the underlying causal variable are tested using new data in the six countries. On the one hand, district magnitude is found to have the predicted differential effect on legislators’ local office-holding in open-list and closed-list systems. Even as the number of legislators having held local office decreases as their electoral constituency grows in size, on the other hand it is intra-party competition that is the key.

Trust Is Good, Control Is Better: Multiparty Government and Legislative Organization

Even though institutional design clearly shapes legislative processes and outputs, explanation of cross-national variation in how legislatures are organized remains elusive. Building on research that emphasizes the role of legislatures in enforcing coalition agreements, we provide new data on committee structures in thirty-one parliamentary democracies, demonstrating that where multiparty government is the norm, legislatures tend to develop strong committees that are structurally equipped to enable the governing parties to keep tabs on one another’s ministers. To probe the institutional argument further, we present a case study of committee reform in the Irish parliament. We demonstrate that institutional change within the Irish parliament is directly related to the shift from single-party to multiparty government and in particular to the desire of the smaller coalition party to be able to keep tabs on the larger party’s ministers. The paper aims to spark a deeper dialogue among party and legislative scholars in search of the micro-foundations of legislative organization.

A Divided Nation? The 2014 Belgian Federal Elections

The critical 2010 federal elections left the Flemish nationalists (N-VA) the dominant political party in the north and the francophone Socialists (PS) in the south of the country, unable to find common ground on the issue of devolution. It took no fewer than 541 days – a world record – to form a government rallying Christian Democrats (CD&V and cdH), Liberals (Open VLD and MR), and Socialists (sp.a and PS). The 2014 federal elections marked a change in tone, being fought on socio-economic terms, but confirmed the stalemate nonetheless. The N-VA made further inroads, winning 29.8 per cent of the vote in the Dutch-speaking community. The governing parties held firm, however; the PS in particular remained the largest political formation in the south, winning 31.0 per cent of the vote in the French-speaking community. Moreover, on 25 May 2014 federal elections, regional elections in Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels (and the German-speaking community), and European elections were held simultaneously, further raising the stakes in the complex, interconnected, government formation.

Party loyalty and electoral dealignment

Representative democracy is party democracy. Parties vote together in the legislative arena; party labels act as information shortcuts in the electoral arena, tying together co-partisan legislators’ re-election prospects. But the utility of party labels is weakened by waning party identifications in the electorate. Partisan dealignment therefore risks undercutting party loyalty on the part of backbenchers. Combining district-level data on electoral volatility and new data from the PARTIREP survey of legislators in 15 advanced industrial democracies, it is demonstrated that party loyalty is lowest where partisan dealignment is strongest – even after accounting for backbenchers’ policy preferences, whether they represent the ruling party or the opposition, and their campaign strategies. Our results have important implications for the sustainability of current models of representative democracy.

Too much choice, too little impact: a multilevel analysis of the contextual determinants of preference voting

Abstract Despite the rich and growing body of research addressing how turnout and party choice depend on the institutional context, far less is known about the impact of the political environment on voters’ propensity to vote for candidates – not parties. Recent single-country studies have focused almost exclusively on individual-level resource- and identity-based differences in preference voting. Combining data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) and Participation and Representation in Modern Democracies (PARTIREP) election studies in six countries, this article provides the first comprehensive, cross-national test of the impact of macro-contextual factors on a voter’s decision to indicate a candidate preference, instead of simply casting a party list vote. It demonstrates that both the failure of preference votes to affect the allocation of seats and choice overload dissuade voters from marking a candidate name on the ballot. These contextual factors affect informed and uninformed voters differently, moreover. The findings have important implications for electoral scholars and political practitioners when designing electoral systems.