Yuko Kasuya

Measuring party linkage across districts: Some party system inflation indices and their properties

In this article we suggest improved measures of ‘party linkage’ across districts. The degree of party linkage, defined as the extent to which parties are uniformly successful in winning votes across districts, is an important but neglected issue in the party politics literature. It is particularly important in understanding the nature of national-level party system formation. Our suggested indices build on the measure of party linkage introduced by Cox (1999), which he named the party system ‘inflation index’ since it measures the inflation from the district-level to the national-level party system size that occurs in the process of party system aggregation. Our measures improve on Cox by making it more intuitive, introducing an appropriate weighting scheme, and suggesting a subnational-level measurement of party linkage. We examine the properties and the usefulness of our measures by numerical simulation and by empirical application to data from Italy, India, Germany, and the United States.

A guide to the constitutional structures and electoral systems of east, south and southeast Asia

In 1997 an economic crisis swept through much of Asia. In addition to the various proximal causes of the crises, e.g. overvalued exchange rates, lax banking regulations, etc., political structures have received much attention. Some claim that problems in countries’ political structures set the stage for the crisis. Others argue that governments’ responses to the crisis were helped or hindered by existing political institutions. However, research on the consequences of Asian political institutions is hampered by a lack of basic information on the different constitutional and electoral frameworks around the region. This article is an attempt to help fill this void by providing a description of the constitutional structures and electoral systems of 17 Asian-Pacific countries since 1945.  2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Afghanistan’s strong president and weak parties

Since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, Afghanistan has belonged to the league of democracies in Asia. Prior to this regime change, the country had experienced 30 years of civil war, and only a decadelong, relatively democratic period during the 1960s. Such political history makes it difficult to write this chapter; because of the paucity of existing research on democratic institutions, the period that can be studied is very limited, and data are hard to obtain. With these caveats in mind, this chapter analyses Afghanistan’s executive-legislative relations with a focus on the period of the first parliamentary term, from 2005 to 2010. Although the number of studies on Afghan politics has grown rapidly during recent years,1 there remains a paucity of research on executive-legislative relationships that takes theoretical and comparative perspectives. This chapter is one of the first attempts to study Afghan politics from such perspectives.

The State of Malapportionment in the World: One Person, One Vote?

Malapportionment — the discrepancy between the share of legislative seats and the share of the population, or electorates, within a given geographical unit — violates one of the fundamental principles of democratic government, namely, “one person, one vote.” It also leads to undesirable governance in several ways. Despite its importance, relatively little research exists on this topic. This study attempts to fill this gap by highlighting two aspects. First, we provide the most extensive dataset of malapportionment currently available, accumulating data from 83 countries and 216 elections. This dataset compares the following measures of malapportionment: (1) the Loosemore–Hanby index-based measure provided in Samuels and Snyder (2001), called MALSS, in this study, (2) the ratio of largest-to-smallest districts, or the max–min ratio (MALMAXMIN), and (3) MALGINI, which employs the calculation method of the Gini index. Our analyses show that MALSS and MALGINI are highly correlated, but MALMAXMIN yields a highly different value in comparison with MALSS and MALGINI. Second, our regression analyses, using a new database we developed, show that most of the factors that previously argued to influence the degree of malapportionment are not robustly significant, except for the single-member district (SMD) electoral formula.