Indridi H. Indridason

To Adopt or Not to Adopt Proportional Representation: The Politics of Institutional Choice

In September 1864, the Association Internationale pour le Progres des Sciences Sociales met in Amsterdam to examine the system of proportional representation (PR) which had just been proposed by Thomas Hare. The meeting signalled a growing interest in systems of PR across the more democratic nations of the world – some of which had already begun experimenting with it. Sixty years later, the majority of existing democracies, including Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, had adopted PR for the election of their national legislatures. Why did so many countries decide to shift to PR? Why did the shift occur at a given point in time, not earlier or later? Why did some countries never move to PR? These are the questions that we address in this Note. We are interested in exploring the factors that influenced the decision to adopt PR at the turn of the twentieth century. We argue that two factors of considerable theoretical relevance were particularly important in facilitating the shift to PR: the spread of democratic ideas and the presence of a majority (usually two-round) system and, as a consequence, a multi-party system. Carstairss classic history of electoral systems shows that at the turn of the twentieth century there was a strong demand for PR, which was linked to a more general demand for democratization. As Carstairs notes, there was a general movement in the direction of more democratic political institutions which took several different forms … There was a movement for the establishment or strengthening of parliamentary institutions … Extensions of the franchise for parliamentary elections enabled an increasingly large proportion of the population to gain representation in parliament … With these developments it became a matter of increasing concern that the elected members of parliament and the parties they supported should fairly represent the various interests and opinions of the electorate.

Comparing Strategic Voting under FPTP and PR

Based on recent work that suggests that voters in proportional representation (PR) systems have incentives to cast strategic votes, the authors hypothesize that levels of strategic voting are similar in both first-past-the-post (FPTP) and PR systems. Comparing vote intentions in majoritarian elections in the United States, Mexico, Britain, and Israel to PR elections in Israel and the Netherlands, the authors find that a substantial proportion of the voters desert their most preferred candidate or party and that patterns of strategic voting across FPTP and PR bear striking similarities. In every election, smaller parties tend to lose votes to major parties. Because there tend to be more small parties in PR systems, tactical voting is actually more common under PR than under FPTP. The findings suggest that whatever the electoral system, voters focus on the policy consequences of their behavior and which parties are likely to influence policy outcomes following the election.

Making Candidates Count: The Logic of Electoral Alliances in Two-Round Legislative Elections

Electoral systems have been shown to influence strategic voting and the development of party systems but the focus has rarely been on the strategies that parties adopt to take advantage of the electoral system under which they compete. Electoral pacts form one such strategy. We present a theory about the formation of electoral pacts in majority run-off elections and pay special attention to the consequences of the presence of extremist parties. Analyzing the 2002 French legislative elections we find that the Socialists and the Greens were more likely to form an alliance (and to agree on a common candidate) in closely contested constituencies and where there was a potential of coordination failure on the right. Finally, we show that the agreement primarily benefited the larger party.

Making words count: Coalition agreements and cabinet management

The cabinet is a central actor in policy making in parliamentary systems. Yet, relatively little is known about how coalition cabinets operate. The delegation of decision-making authority to ministers invites policy drift, which threatens the cohesiveness of the cabinets policy programme. Cabinets employ a variety of methods to contain policy drift. The writing of coalition agreements is among the major tools, but there are others, including limiting ministerial autonomy and the use of junior ministers to shadow ministers. The present study demonstrates that coalition agreements are written to contain policy drift and that it is directly related to the degree of hierarchy in the cabinet. It studies the factors that affect the likelihood of a coalition agreement being written and how extensive they are, if written. Among these are the ideological diversity found in the cabinet, the use of alternative methods for controlling ministers and the complexity of the bargaining situation.

Let’s Just Agree to Disagree: Dispute Resolution Mechanisms in Coalition Agreements

Scholars of coalition politics have increasingly begun to focus on conflict within coalitions. Here we examine the role of coalition agreements in managing intracoalitional conflict. We argue that there is a trade-off between making policy agreements at the coalition’s formation (e.g., by making very detailed policy platforms) and postponing the issue’s resolution by creating procedures for settling policy disputes. We argue that the trade-off is increasingly likely to be resolved in favor of relying on a formal dispute resolution mechanism when coalitions are ideologically heterogeneous and the coalition parties differ in size. We test our theory using data from the German Länder between 1990 and 2013. These data allow us to isolate the effects of the bargaining situation and ideology while holding the institutional context constant. The empirical results support our main argument: When intracoalition conflict is high, parties write shorter coalition contracts but are more likely to adopt procedures for conflict resolution.

Expressive motives and third-party candidates

The electoral success of an extremist party usually attracts considerable attention. Yet, they rarely have an opportunity to directly influence policy as they are, more often than not, shut out of the policy-making process by mainstream parties. Extremist parties may, however, influence policy indirectly by inducing mainstream parties to adjust their electoral strategies. I consider a model of electoral competition between an expressive extremist party and two mainstream parties in first-past-the-post and majority runoff elections. The presence of an extremist party results in an equilibrium policy outcome that is further away from the extremist’s preferred policy but the magnitude of the effect is shown to depend on the type of electoral system.