In this chapter, we turn our attention away from strategic defection by voters and elites and the number of parties under plurality rules to focus on the types of people who win office in democratic elections. More specifically, we explore how political context conditions the impact of electoral rules on the election of women to legislative office.

The election of women to public office is inherently important. Intuitively, female representation offers symbolic benefits for gender equality (see Phillips 1995), and there is evidence that female legislators behave differently from their male counterparts (Mansbridge 1999; Bratton and Ray 2002). It is therefore noteworthy that electoral systems are important in shaping the degree to which women win elected office. Significant research indicates that larger shares of women gain office under closed-list proportional representation rules than in single-member districts, but this finding is more consistent in consolidated democracies than in new ones.

The literature implicitly highlights two features of PR that especially help women’s representation. First, the closed-list party vote in many PR systems would appear to help women over the more candidate-centered balloting under SMDs: compared with the process by which candidates are nominated for SMD races, national party leaders appear more inclined to nominate women, so closed party lists and centralized party nomination processes are seen as more conducive to women’s representation (Norris 1993; Valdini 2005, 2006). Moreover, some voters may not wish to vote for a woman under SMD rules when they cast their ballots for individual candidates, but see no problem with casting a ballot for a list that includes women under PR where they vote for a party. Second, the higher district magnitudes of PR systems also appear to offer women a better shot at election than single-member districts (especially FPTP) by lowering the effective threshold (i.e., the share of the vote) necessary for election.

In Chapter 1, we suggested a number of ways that we believe electoral rules may affect politics while also being conditioned by other factors. In this chapter, we discuss how studying mixed-member electoral systems with an approach that Arend Lijphart labeled “controlled comparison” can help us investigate these electoral rule effects.

In the first part of this chapter, we describe the basic workings of “two-vote” mixed-member systems and explain how these systems make the controlled comparison approach possible. We highlight how this approach to the study of mixed-member systems offers a number of advantages in studying the differing effects of SMD and PR electoral rules. In the second part of the chapter, we discuss “contamination” between the PR and SMD tiers – the chief misgiving offered by critics of the controlled comparison approach to studying mixed-member systems – and explain why we believe that contamination does not cause significant problems for the analysis in this book. In the third and final part of the chapter, we describe the defining characteristics of mixed-member systems, outline the major variations found within this classification of electoral system, and discuss how these variations may have important consequences of their own.

In the early 1990s, Japan and Russia each adopted a very similar version of a “mixed-member” electoral system. In the form used in Japan and Russia, in elections to a single house of the legislature each voter cast two ballots: one for a candidate in a single-member district (SMD) and one for a party under proportional representation (PR). In the SMD races, both countries used first-past-the-post (FPTP) rules, meaning that the candidate winning the largest number of votes in the district wins the race, even if tallying under a majority of all the SMD ballots cast. In PR, parties win shares of seats roughly in proportion to their share of the party vote. In both Japan and Russia, the PR systems used closed-list rules, meaning that prior to each election central party leaders put together a rank-ordered list of candidates to determine which individuals would win seats if the party won representation in PR. In PR in both countries, voters were only given the chance to choose a single pre-set party list. Both countries used mixed-member-majoritarian (MMM) electoral systems, meaning that the SMD and PR components of the system were “unlinked” – seats won by a party in one tier (e.g., SMDs) did not affect the number of seats allocated to the party in the other tier (e.g., PR). In short, both Russia and Japan adopted very similar forms of mixed-member electoral systems.

In both countries, it was widely expected that the different rules would promote particular outcomes: The SMD tier was expected to lead to a small number of large, catchall parties, especially at the district level. The PR tier was supposed to promote the proliferation of political parties, greater proportionality, and more female representation – especially when compared with results in the SMD tier.

Probably the most well-known literature on electoral systems highlights how electoral rules shape the number of parties (see especially Cox 1997; Duverger 1954; Lijphart 1994; Taagepera and Shugart 1989). We, therefore, begin our analysis by exploring how different rules affect the number of parties, but we then turn to how political context – in the form of democratic experience and party institutionalization – conditions the effects of rules.

In this chapter, we lay out the concepts necessary to explore the relationship between electoral rules, context, and the number of parties. First, we discuss the principal expectations about how electoral rules affect disproportionality (i.e., the extent to which parties’ seat shares deviate from their share of the vote) and the number of parties. Second, we consider how democratic experience and party system development may condition these effects. Third, we explain how we measure the central variables – especially disproportionality, the effective number of parties, democratic experience, and party institutionalization. Finally, we discuss how specific institutional features of mixed-member systems might also shape the number of parties.

Cutting to the chase, and laying out our most important expectation, we expect restrictive electoral rules (especially FPTP) to be much less likely to constrain the number of parties in new democracies, especially those with poorly developed party systems, than in established democracies.

Thus far, this book has focused on the interactive effect on political outcomes of electoral rules and the level of democratic and party system development. In this chapter, we shift our focus to how electoral rules interact with a different category of political context, social diversity, to affect the party system.

A long line of research has argued that the number of parties in a country is the product of an interactive process between the number of social cleavages and the electoral system, whereby social heterogeneity has little effect on the number of parties under “restrictive” rules such as first-past-the-post (Duverger 1954; Ordeshook and Shvetsova 1994; Amorim Neto and Cox 1997; Clark and Golder 2006; Singer and Stephenson 2009). Many scholars posit that as the number of distinct groups in society increases, so will the number of parties, but that this relationship will exist only under “permissive” electoral rules (such as PR with high district magnitude and little or no legal threshold of representation). The incentives of the electoral system under restrictive rules drive voters, groups, and elites to withdraw their support from candidates who are unlikely to be competitive, and instead line up only behind those truly “in the running” – thereby leading to a small number of parties (or candidates), irrespective of the number of distinct groups in society.

In Chapter 4, we showed that there is significant variation in the number of parties under different electoral rules and political contexts, but we did not demonstrate the mechanisms – such as strategic defection by voters and elites – that underpin the different results we found. In Chapter 5, we began to show how rules and context shape strategic defection by voters under SMD rules, but the existence of a “personal” vote often obscured our view of much of the strategic voting that probably did occur. In this chapter, we introduce a different approach, which we use to highlight more directly how political context – most notably, democratic experience and party system development – conditions the impact of SMD rules on strategic defection in mixed-member electoral systems.

Specifically, we use Cox's (e.g., 1997) “SF ratio” measure (usually the vote total of the third-place contestant [the “Second loser”] divided by the vote total of the second-place contestant [the “First loser’]) to help draw inferences about strategic defection under particular electoral rules. As we do throughout this book, we use mixed-member systems to gain analytical leverage on electoral system effects. In this chapter we examine patterns of strategic defection in mixed-member systems in 41 elections in 11 different countries, considering how SF ratio patterns within a given country differ between the SMD and PR tiers of mixed-member systems. We show how SF ratio patterns in SMDs – unlike those in PR – often highlight the presence of strategic behavior, presumably because many voters and elites, when facing a competitive district race, transfer their support from candidates/parties who are unlikely to win to one of the top two contestants.

In Chapter 3, we set up a number of variables and expectations regarding disproportionality and the number of parties. In this chapter, we now take advantage of the simultaneous existence of PR and SMD rules in mixed-member systems across a range of established and new democracies to investigate the extent to which these expectations bear out in reality.

We examine four key electoral outcomes: (1) disproportionality (LSq), the most common measure of the mechanical effect of electoral rules, (2) the constraining effect of SMDs on the number of parties, as measured by the mean effective number of candidates in SMDs (Ncands), (3) the psychological effect, as measured by the difference – within SMDs – between the effective number of parties winning votes under PR balloting and the effective number of candidates winning votes in SMD balloting (Nparties minus Ncands), and (4) the projection of district-level party configurations to the national level, as measured by the nationally aggregated effective number of parties receiving SMD votes and the effective number of candidates at the district level receiving SMD votes (Nv SMD minus Ncands).

In each of these cases, we expect democratic experience and party system development to condition the effects of electoral rules. More specifically, we expect that, compared with established democracies, in new democracies disproportionality will be higher, SMDs will lead to a weaker psychological effect that promotes a larger number of parties, and there will be less matching between the number of parties at the district and national levels. Indeed, in this chapter we find that these expectations bear out.

In this book, we argue that electoral systems often do not lead to the outcomes that scholars commonly attribute to them because the effects of electoral rules are conditioned by the context in which they operate. We do not suggest that most existing theories about the effects of electoral rules are wrong across all contexts. We also do not claim that we are the first to acknowledge and highlight the impact that political context can have on electoral system effects. However, we do argue that the electoral system literature has tended to emphasize the ability of electoral systems to shape electoral outcomes irrespective of context. Thus, our central point is that many important ideas about the effects of electoral systems are founded on the assumption of particular contextual foundations, and that the effects of electoral rules differ in a predictable and systematic way when the rules operate in a different context.

CONTEXT CONDITIONS INSTITUTIONAL EFFECTS

In the broadest sense, this book offers a different emphasis regarding the interpretation of how institutions and context interact to influence outcomes. In much of the scholarship on institutions, especially work in the rational-choice institutionalist vein, formal rules are expected to impinge on the environments in which they are embedded. The expectation is that institutions channel behavior in consistent ways, and therefore produce relatively uniform outcomes. Much of the distinction between the effects of different electoral rules made by the literature is due to the expectation of a conditioning effect of “restrictive” rules (e.g., FPTP). FPTP is expected to deny representation to parties and candidates who win only a small share of the vote, and therefore leads to outcomes that are different from what we see under “permissive” rules (e.g., PR with high district magnitude and low legal thresholds of representation), which provide representation even to contestants who win relatively few votes. For example, the most common argument regarding the interaction between context, in the form of social diversity, and electoral systems is that greater social diversity promotes the proliferation of political parties except in the presence of (restrictive) single-member district, first-past-the-post electoral rules. Most scholarship argues that FPTP rules place a brake on the effect that social diversity has on party system fractionalization because of the incentives that the rules create for voters to defect from small parties to larger, more competitive alternatives. As a result, irrespective of social diversity, FPTP rules ought to cap the number of viable competitors at two per district.

In Chapter 4, we began to consider the conditionality of electoral system effects through an analysis of the number of parties in mixed-member systems. We saw that FPTP rules produce their expected effects in established democracies, most notably by constraining the number of parties. At the same time, we saw a very different result under FPTP rules in new democracies, which tended to produce many more parties. We argued that these different outcomes were due to far greater strategic defection in established democracies by candidates and their supporters who faced little chance of success in SMDs, but this argument was merely conjecture; we did not demonstrate the behavior that underlay the different results. To get at these mechanisms, we need to delve more deeply into whether voters and elites in different contexts do, in fact, behave in this way. We need to address the question: Is there, in fact, more strategic defection in established democracies than in new ones? In Chapters 5 and 6, we address this issue of strategic defection under different contexts.

In this chapter, we study votes cast under mixed-member systems to learn more about the factors that shape voting behavior. Our principal aim is to explore the conditions under which voters will be likely to cast strategic ballots, whereby they withdraw support from their preferred candidate in order to affect the race, but our strongest findings in this chapter relate to the personal vote. In the study of mixed-member electoral systems, work on strategic voting is particularly well established. Ticket splitting in which a greater number of votes are cast for large parties in the SMD tier than in the PR tier (and a smaller number of votes are cast for minor parties in SMDs) has been put forward as evidence that voters react strategically to restrictive electoral rules – such as FPTP – that tend to deny representation to minor parties. On this topic, the literature gives substantial attention to strategic voting, but does not account sufficiently for another factor that can drive ticket splitting: the personal vote – additional SMD votes cast for a candidate due to the candidate's personal appeal to voters.