Electoral Institutions, Hometowns and Favored Minorities Evidence from Japanese Electoral Reforms

Abstract This paper presents evidence that electoral institutions affect the geographic distribution of both candidate electoral support and government resources. I exploit two electoral reforms in Japan to identify the effect of institutional incentives: 1) the 1994 electoral reform from a multi-member district (MMD) system to a mixed single-member district/proportional representation (SMD/PR) system; and 2) the 1925 electoral reform from SMD system to a MMD system. Using several new datasets, the two main findings of this paper are: 1) the electoral support of Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) politicians is more concentrated around their hometowns in MMD as compared to SMD systems; and 2) intergovernmental transfers are more concentrated around LDP incumbents' home offices in MMD as compared to SMD systems. In addition to being consistent with the theoretical results i

Socially relevant ethnic groups, ethnic structure, and AMAR

Protracted conflicts over the status and demands of ethnic and religious groups have caused more instability and loss of human life than any other type of local, regional, and international conflict since the end of World War II. Yet we still have accumulated little in the way of accepted knowledge about the ethnic landscape of the world. In part this is due to empirical reliance on the limited data in the Minorities at Risk (MAR) project, whose selection biases are well known. In this article we tackle the construction of a list of ‘socially relevant’ ethnic groups meeting newly justified criteria in a dataset we call AMAR (A for All). We find that one of the principal difficulties in constructing the list is determining the appropriate level of aggregation for groups. To address this issue, we enumerate subgroups of the commonly recognized groups meeting our criteria so that scholars can use the subgroup list as one reference in the construction of the list of ethnic groups most appropriate for their study. Our conclusion outlines future work on the data using this expanded dataset on ethnic groups

When do electoral institutions trigger electoral misconduct?

<p>Drawing on two complementary mechanisms, this article explores the question of whether electoral institutions and conditions of electoral competition create incentives to promote electoral misconduct in young or developing democracies. The first mechanism explains how majoritarian institutions like disproportional electoral systems are more likely to trigger electoral fraud than consensus electoral institutions like proportional representation. However, for this mechanism to be activated, the incumbent must feel effectively threatened by the opposition. To better understand the way this mechanism works, the electoral history of the country also needs to be taken into consideration. Democracies which have a historical record of running clean elections are less likely to experience fraud than countries with a history of electoral misconduct. I test these theoretical claims using a dataset that contains relevant information for 323 parliamentary elections in 59 new or developing democracies in the period between 1960 and 2006. The empirical analysis shows a strong and robust empirical support for the two mechanisms.</p