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

在过去的几十年里，选举研究对选举机构的影响产生了深刻的见解。然而，我们面临着四个方法论问题。首先，经典的横截面设计不允许控制所有可能的影响变量；其次，对政治分裂的测量可能导致忽略变量偏差；第三，许多现有的研究忽略了时间趋势；第四，选举研究存在所谓的内生性问题，这一问题尚未得到解决。我们项目的准实验纵向设计使我们能够为这些问题开发解决方案。我们从选举研究的见解中得出关于选举制度变化后果的假设，并从国家宏观层面、选民中观层面和个人微观层面进行分析。我们采用时间序列横截面和匹配程序。这使我们能够就选举研究的基本假设的有效性得出结论。此外，该项目还有助于进一步发展政治制度理论及其有效组织政治行为者行为的能力。

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.