Some countries attempt to ‘temper’ the political party system unpredictability by introducing measures to halt fragmentation, such as representation thresholds. Here, Damien Bol, Jean-Benoit Pilet, and Pedro Riera argue that national legislators are more likely to adopt one of these electoral mechanisms when a large number of other countries have made similar choices in recent years

Bol, Damian

Pilet, Jean-Benoit

Riera, Pedro

Bol, Damien

LSE Research Online

democraticaudit.com http://www.democraticaudit.com/?p=13299By Democratic Audit UKThe take-up of mechanisms designed to temper proportionalrepresentation shows that countries don’t choose theirelectoral systems and rules in a vacuumSome countries attempt to ‘temper’ the political party system unpredictability by introducing measures to haltfragmentation, such as representation thresholds. Here, Damien Bol, Jean-Benoit Pilet , and Pedro Riera arguethat national legislators are more likely to adopt one of these electoral mechanisms when a large number ofother countries have made similar choices in recent years. Credit: ahblair, CC BY SA 2.0These last decades, the possibility of changing the electoral system has been brought at the political agenda ofmany democracies. In 2011, the Tory-LibDem government organised a referendum on the convenience ofreplacing the first past the post system used to elect the House of Commons by an Australian-like alternativevoting system. In the 1990s, the Italian government implemented a variant of the German mixed-member systemfor the election of the lower house of the national parliament. About 10 years later, the decision was made to turnback to a proportional representation system with a seat bonus for the largest coalition. During the 2012presidential election campaign in France, several candidates (including the current President Hollande) advocatedthe introduction of some dose of proportionality in the two-round system used for legislative elections.Following these events, a broad community of researchers has been studying the reasons why governments andlegislators choose an electoral system over others. According to many, the ruling elite seeks to secure its positionsby anticipating the effect of various possible electoral systems on the allocation of seats. Despite theirinternational and comparative focus, the assumption is often made, usually implicitly, that episodes of electoralsystem choice are independent from each other. Actors involved in these processes are often presented as beingcompletely unaware of, or at least not affected by, what is happening abroad. Yet there is no reason to discard thepossibility of international diffusion of electoral systems. In a recent article, we use data from European countriesbetween 1945 and 2011 to test the hypothesis according to which the adoption of electoral systems that aresuperior in terms of electoral outcomes tends to spread among peer countries.The case for limited proportional representationEvery electoral system has pros and cons. One of the fundamental issues for electoral engineering is the trade-offbetween fair representation and accountability. Proportional representation tends to produce more inclusiveparliaments than first past the post. However, the system’s rules also result in a greater number of parties inparliament, and therefore a decrease in the chances that a single party will win an absolute majority of seats.Under such circumstances, governments are usually composed of coalitions of more than one party, which tend toundermine the identification of which parties are to blame (or to be rewarded) for good and bad policy outcomes.In 2011’s article, Carey and Hix have changed our perceptions of this trade-off by arguing that an electoral ‘sweetspot’ exists. This sweet spot emerges when a system tempers pure proportional representation to produce anarrangement wherein excessive party fragmentation and the unfair exclusion of small parties are balanced,thereby achieving the most efficient representation. According to them, a proportional representation system thatis combined with either low-magnitude multimember districts or high electoral thresholds can hit the electoralsweet spot. Our article builds on this by arguing for the diffusion of low district magnitudes and high electoralthresholds in the after World War II period in Europe.AnalysesIn our article, we analyse spatial-temporal trends in the use of low district magnitudes and high electoralthresholds in proportional representation systems of European countries between 1945 (or the first democraticelection) and 2011. To do so, we rely on data collected within the Electoral System Change in Europe since 1945project, for which national experts have been invited to translate the electoral rules of all European democracies.Our sample shows quite a large variation in the usage of low district magnitudes and high electoral thresholds.While some countries have continuously used at least one of these mechanisms and often both (especially recentdemocracies such as Estonia, Hungary or Lithuania), other countries, such as Finland, Luxembourg and theNetherlands, have never implemented any of them. On average, 75% of European countries have used at leastone of the mechanisms at one point in time.We also observe an overall increase in the use of at least one of the two electoral mechanisms. This increase isparticularly striking in the 1990s following the democratisation of Central and Eastern European countries. Thesecountries massively adopted high electoral thresholds, which are nowadays used to elect national legislatures inmore than 50% of European democracies employing proportional representation (although they were almostnever used at the beginning of the covered period). By contrast, the overall use of low district magnitudes remainsrelatively constant over the sampled period (at around 30%-40%). The following table describes the countriesincluded in our analysis, and the first election and last election for which low district magnitudes and high electoralthresholds have been used.Country First democratic election Low magnitudes High thresholdsAustria 1949 [1949-1969][1994-…]Belgium 1946 [1946-1984] [2003-…]Bulgaria 1990 [1990]Croatia 1992 [1995-…]Cyprus 1981 [1981-1984] [1981-1995]Czech Republic 1996 [1996-…]Denmark 1947 [1947-1970][1997-…]Estonia 1992 [1992-…]Finland 1948Germany 1949 [1949-…]Greece 1977 [1977-…] [1977-1985]Hungary 1990 [1990-…] [1994-…]Iceland 1946 [1946-…] [2003-…]Italy 1948 [1994-2005]Latvia 1993 [1995-…]Lithuania 1992 [1992-…] [1996-…]Luxembourg 1945Netherlands 1946Norway 1949 [1949-1972]Poland 1991 [1993-2000] [1993-…]Portugal 1976Romania 1990 [2000-…]Slovakia 1994 [1994-…]Slovenia 1990Spain 1979 [1979-…]Sweden 1948Switzerland 1947To test our hypothesis, we estimate logistic models predicting the adoption of either low district magnitudes or highelectoral thresholds according to the proportion of peer countries having adopted them within a given time-span.We use several definitions of peer countries, namely historical (same democratisation period), linguistic (samelinguistic group), and geographical (common boundaries). The figure below reports the coefficient estimates (andthe 95% confidence intervals) associated with the diffusion variable for low district magnitudes, for historical peercountries, and for all time-spans between two (i.e., the current and the immediately preceding years) and tenyears.We see that the effect of diffusion diminishes as the time-span increases. The diffusion effect is strong andstatistically significant when diffusion is defined as the proportion of adoptions among peer countries within thelast two, three or four years. This effect is much smaller when the diffusion time-span is set at five years (andmore). These results suggest that the diffusion trends among peer countries are rather short-lived and that theadoptions abroad stop having an influence on domestic decisions after a couple of years. The results are similarfor adoption of high electoral thresholds.These effects are robust to various statistical specifications, to our three definitions of peer countries, and to theinclusion of various controls including those capturing the classical explanation of electoral system choice (i.e.,seat-maximisation and party system fragmentation). As further evidence supporting this argument, we also findelements of diffusion in parliamentary debates surrounding episodes of electoral system change in severalcountries.ConclusionDespite the international and comparative focus of much of the scientific work on electoral system choice, theliterature still often fails to take into consideration that electoral engineering processes at the national level do notoccur in a vacuum. Our empirical analysis supports the existence of short-lived international trends in the adoptionof low district magnitudes and high electoral thresholds. The likelihood that a country adopts one of thesearrangements increases with the number of peer countries that have recently adopted a similar system.The main contribution of this article is to highlight the need of taking into account the diffusion of innovation acrosscountries in works on electoral adoption and reform, as well as more broadly in research on institutional choice.—To see the article on which this post is based, click here. It represents the views of the author and not those ofDemocratic Audit UK or the LSE. Please read our comments policy before posting.—Damien Bol is  a political science postdoctoral fellow at the Canadian Research Chair inElectoral Studies of the University of Montreal.  Jean-Benoit Pilet is professor of political science at Universite libre de Bruxelles ( ULB) anddirector of Cevipol.  Pedro Riera is a social sciences faculty member at the University of Carlos III Madrid 

The take-up of mechanisms designed to temper proportional representation shows that countries don’t choose their electoral systems and rules in a vacuum

The take-up of mechanisms designed to temper proportional representation shows that countries don’t choose their electoral systems and rules in a vacuum

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