The Consequences of Electoral System Change. Analysing the Effects of Political Institutions

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Electoral research has generated deep insights into the effects of electoral institutions in the last decades. Nonetheless, we are confronted with four methodological problems. First, the classical cross-sectional design does not allow to control for all possibly influential variables; second, the measurement of political cleavages potentially leads to omitted variable bias; third, many existing studies neglect time trends; and fourth, electoral research suffers from the so called endogeneity problem which remains unsolved. The quasi-experimental longitudinal design of our project allows us to develop solutions for these problems. We derive our hypotheses on the consequences of electoral system change from the insights of electoral research and analyse them at the national macro level, the meso level of the constituency and the individual micro level. We employ time-series cross-section and matching procedures. This enables us to draw conclusions on the validity of basic assumptions of electoral research. In addition, the project perspectively helps to further develop theories of political institutions and their capability to effectively structure the behaviour of political actors.