Collaborative Research: Electoral Systems and Party Personnel:The Consequences of Reform and Non-Reform

合作研究：选举制度和政党人员：改革与不改革的后果

• 批准号: 0751662
• 负责人: Matthew Shugart
• 金额: $ 48.26万
• 依托单位: University of California-San Diego
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-07-01 至 2016-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0751662&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Electoral; Systems; Party

The electoral system-rules governing how votes translate into seats in the legislature-is critical to affecting the quality of representation in any democracy. How does the electoral system influence the qualities of candidates recruited by democratic parties? How do the qualities of candidates influence in turn the party, parliamentary, and governmental positions they receive upon winning election? Do political parties tailor their personnel strategies differently in different types of electoral systems and if so, how? These are the core questions of this project. Political scientists have long and deeply studied electoral systems, political parties, and legislative organization. However, they have rarely looked at the way that voters? and politicians? political behavior, the type of candidates parties choose to run for office, and the party, legislative, and governmental positions they get after being elected are systematically related, and almost never examined these cross-nationally. This project fills that gap. Generally, there are two types of electoral systems, one type (we call the "nominal" type; for e.g., the single seat districts of the U.S. and U.K.) in which seats are allocated solely based on votes cast for candidates, and the other the list proportional representation type in which seats are first allocated to parties based on votes cast for lists, and only thereafter to candidates nominated on those lists (e.g. Portugal). These two types of electoral systems create very different incentives for political parties. For example, the nominal type has candidates running as individuals in geographically concentrated districts whereas the PR type has candidates running as partisan "teams" in relatively more dispersed constituencies. In our research, we ask whether these divergent party incentives result in different types of candidates being nominated and different career patterns for elected representatives. In the 1990s, several countries reformed their electoral systems, often to a mixed or hybrid system of both types although the nominal or list side could be dominant. These changes provide us with the opportunity to isolate the effect of the electoral system on party personnel strategies from various other possible causes. In order to come close to a ?controlled experiment? we analyze eight countries. Four (Japan, New Zealand, Ukraine, and Bolivia) changed their electoral system in the 1990s, some to more nominally-weighted and some to more proportionally weighted systems. Four other countries did not change their systems: U.K. (nominal), Portugal (list), Lithuania (nominal-leaning mixed), and Germany (mixed proportional). Comparing cases of system change with those with no change thus allow us to compare the actual effects of electoral reform on the type of personnel that parties choose to run as candidates and the post-election assignment to important positions. To do this, we construct large statistical databases in each country of party candidates and representatives? posts before and after electoral reform in the change cases, and a sample of the candidates and officials during the same time period for the non-change cases. These databases in these eight countries are an invaluable resource for future researchers studying electoral systems, elections, and legislative structures.This project helps us understand how electoral systems influence representation: who is chosen to be a candidate and how they represent the voters after election. The extent to which different electoral systems and types of candidates result in different types of political careers for representatives tells us much about how democratic publics are represented in policy-making institutions. In turn these findings helps us understand more about policy variations across countries and across time, the role of interests groups in representation and policy-making, and other issues of central concern to the performance of democratic political systems.

选举制度——决定选票如何转化为立法机构席位的规则——对任何民主国家的代表质量都至关重要。选举制度如何影响民主党派招募的候选人的素质？候选人的素质如何反过来影响他们在赢得选举后获得的政党、议会和政府职位？在不同的选举制度下，政党的人事战略是否有所不同？如果有，是如何调整的？这些都是这个项目的核心问题。政治学家长期深入研究选举制度、政党和立法组织。然而，他们很少看到选民的方式？和政客?政治行为，政党选择竞选公职的候选人类型，以及他们当选后获得的政党，立法机构和政府职位都是系统相关的，几乎从未在跨国范围内进行过研究。这个项目填补了这一空白。一般来说，有两种类型的选举制度，一种类型（我们称之为“名义”类型，例如，美国和英国的单席位区），席位仅根据候选人的投票分配，另一种是名单比例代表制，席位首先根据投票名单分配给政党，然后才分配给这些名单上提名的候选人（例如葡萄牙）。这两种选举制度为政党创造了截然不同的激励机制。例如，名义类型的候选人在地理上集中的地区以个人身份竞选，而公关类型的候选人在相对分散的选区以党派“团队”的形式竞选。在我们的研究中，我们询问这些不同的政党激励是否导致不同类型的候选人被提名，以及当选代表的不同职业模式。在1990年代，一些国家改革了它们的选举制度，通常是两种类型的混合或混合制度，尽管名义或名单方面可能占主导地位。这些变化使我们有机会将选举制度对政党人事战略的影响与其他各种可能的原因分离开来。为了接近a ？实验控制吗?我们分析了八个国家。四个国家（日本、新西兰、乌克兰和玻利维亚）在20世纪90年代改变了他们的选举制度，一些国家采取了名义加权制度，一些国家采取了比例加权制度。其他四个国家没有改变他们的制度：英国（名义），葡萄牙（名单），立陶宛（名义倾斜混合）和德国（混合比例）。因此，将制度变化的情况与没有变化的情况进行比较，可以比较选举改革对政党选择的候选人类型和选举后重要职位的分配的实际影响。为此，我们在每个国家建立了政党候选人和代表的大型统计数据库。选举改革前后的职位变动情况，以及同一时期的候选人和官员的抽样情况为未变动情况。这八个国家的数据库是未来研究选举制度、选举和立法结构的研究人员的宝贵资源。这个项目帮助我们了解选举制度如何影响代表权：谁被选为候选人以及他们在选举后如何代表选民。不同的选举制度和候选人类型在多大程度上导致了代表不同类型的政治生涯，这在很大程度上告诉我们，民主公众是如何在决策机构中得到代表的。反过来，这些发现有助于我们更多地了解不同国家和不同时期的政策差异，利益集团在代表和决策中的作用，以及其他与民主政治制度表现有关的核心问题。