The origins of electoral systems have received scant attention in the literature. Looking at the history of electoral rules in the advanced world in the last century, this paper shows that the existing wide variation in electoral rules across nations can be traced to the strategic decisions that the current ruling parties, anticipating the coordinating consequences of different electoral regime...

The number of political parties and the type of electoral system may impact the level of democratic functioning within a government. Models are used to explore whether the number of political parties increases a country’s democracy score on the POLITY IV measure of democracy, and whether countries with proportional representation electoral systems have higher democracy scores than those without...

In 1925 a new electoral system was introduced in Chile. This reform changed the electoral formula from a cumulative voting system to a proportional one (d ́Hondt) and established new rules about district magnitude and form of voting. It has been argued that this reform was motivated by the emergence of new parties or the expansion of the electorate. This article offers an alternative explanation...

The President of the United States is chosen directly by the Electoral College, although indirectly the citizens select the President. Different states currently employ two systems of electoral-vote allocation under the Electoral College framework: the widely adopted winner-take-all system and the system adopted by Maine and Nebraska. The properties of these two systems are analyzed against the...

We investigate the effects of fiscal transparency and political polarization on the prevalence of electoral cycles in fiscal balance. While some recent political economy literature on electoral cycles identifies such cycles mainly in weak and recent democracies, in contrast we show, conditioning on a new index of institutional fiscal transparency, that electoral cycles in fiscal balance are a f...

All electoral systems have an electoral formula that converts proportions of votes into Parliamentary seats.Pre-electoral polls usually focus on estimating proportions of votes and then apply the electoral formula to give a forecast of Parliamentary composition. We describe the problems that arise from this approach: there will typically be a bias in the forecast. We study the origin of the bia...

This article presents, discusses and tests the hypothesis that it is the number of parties what can explain the choice of electoral systems, rather than the other way round. Already existing political parties tend to choose electoral systems that, rather than generate new party systems by themselves, will crystallize, consolidate or reinforce previously existing party configurations. A general ...