One concern about reform of the electoral system in the Netherlands is whether this would reduce the proportion of women members in the House of Representatives. What evidence is there for this expectation? This study considers these issues, with the first section summarizing the normative arguments why socially inclusive legislatures are thought to be desirable. The representation of women in ...

The conventional wisdom in political science is that legislators’ electioneering practices are closely linked to the electoral systems in which they compete.1 Since electoral concerns are argued to shape legislators’ representation and policy decisions, understanding how electoral incentives differ across electoral systems is useful for explaining cross-national differences representation and p...

Authenticity is a popular buzz word in electoral politics, as electoral candidates and politicians are expected to be authentic in their public interactions. Since 2008, social media has become an integral part of elections in the US, and continues to gain importance in electoral campaigns around the world as social media offers electoral candidates a new medium for communicating with their con...

Present research on minor party performance consists largely of singlecountry studies or pooled studies including a raft of widely varying electoral systems. This study examines the topic from a cross-national perspective, but is limited to democratic polities with single-member districts and first-past-the-post rules. An original dataset is compiled including 217 elections drawn from 37 countr...

This study investigates the effects of electoral systems on ethnic fractionalization in democratic states. The paper addresses the following two questions: (1) does a country’s electoral system have an effect on its level of ethnic fractionalization; and (2) if there is such a relationship, is this effect uniform across all electoral systems or do certain electoral systems effect levels of ethn...

Electoral heresthetics, or the manipulation of electoral systems to a political player’s advantage, had profound political consequences for post-communist transitional Poland. Choices of di¤erent electoral systems contributed ...rst to the fall of communism and later to the reclaiming of power by the postcommunists. Despite high stakes and top priority attached by political players to electoral...

This paper examines the relationship between electoral systems and female representation in four post-communist states that use mixed electoral systems. Mixed electoral systems provide an excellent laboratory to test electoral system effects because voters cast two ballots under very different electoral rules. If the PR and SMD tiers of mixed elections are treated separately, one can study the ...

Over the past few years Papua New Guinea has implemented a series of major political reforms in the electoral, political party and parliamentary arenas. In what constitutes an extremely ambitious attempt to change the way Papua New Guinea’s political system works, the broad aim of this process of political engineering is to strengthen political parties, promote more broadly supported candidates...

The United States, uniquely among all countries, elects its head of state using a two-tiered system called the Electoral College. If we view the states that make up the Electoral College as voters and make some simplifying assumptions, it is possible to use the theory of voting and voting power to measure the power of the individual states in a presidential election. Modeling the Electoral Coll...

In the United States electoral system, a candidate is elected indirectly by winning a majority of electoral votes cast by individual states, the election usually being decided by the votes cast by a small number of " swing states " where the two candidates historically have roughly equal probabilities of winning. The effective value of a swing state in deciding the election is determined not on...