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Electoral Engineering: Electoral Rules and Voting Choices
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| | Unformatted Document Text:
E
LECTORAL
E
NGINEERING
~ C
HAPTER
1 ~ N
ORRIS
8/9/2003
5:09
PM
1
Electoral Engineering:
Voting Rules and Political Behavior
Pippa Norris
Harvard University
www.pippanorris.com
## email not listed ##
Synopsis: From Kosovo to Kabul, the last decade witnessed growing interest in ‘electoral engineering’. Reformers have sought to achieve either greater government accountability through majoritarian arrangements or wider parliamentary diversity through proportional formula. Underlying the normative debates are important claims about the impact and consequences of electoral reform for political representation and voting behavior. This study compares and evaluates two broad schools of thought, each offering contrasting expectations. One popular approach claims that formal rules define the electoral incentives facing parties, politicians, and citizens. By changing the rules, rational choice institutionalism claims that we have the capacity to shape political behavior among politicians and citizens. Reformers believe that electoral engineering can solve multiple social problems, whether by mitigating ethnic conflict, strengthening voter-party bonds, generating democratic accountability, or boosting women’s representation. Alternative cultural modernization theories differ in their emphasis on the primary motors driving human behavior, their expectations about the pace of change, and also their assumptions about the ability of formal institutional rules to alter, rather than adapt to, deeply embedded and habitual social norms and patterns of human behavior.
To consider these issues, this paper sets out the theoretical framework, derived from
the introduction to a new book ‘Electoral Engineering’ forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, New York in Spring 2004. The book compares the consequences of electoral rules and cultural modernization for many dimensions of political representation and voting behavior, including issues of electoral behavior in patterns of party competition, the strength of social cleavages and party loyalties, and levels of turnout, and questions of political representation in the gender and ethnic diversity of parliaments, and the provision of constituency service. Systematic evidence is drawn the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems based on surveys of parliamentary and presidential contests held in over thirty countries ranging from the United States, Australia and Switzerland to Peru, Taiwan and Ukraine. The book concludes that formal rules do matter, with important implications for the choice of electoral systems.
Paper for Panel 34-6 ‘How Do Rules Matter? Electoral Systems and Voting Behavior’ at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 10.00-11.45am Sunday 31
st
August 2003, Philadelphia.
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E
LECTORAL
E
NGINEERING
~ C
HAPTER
1 ~ N
ORRIS
8/9/2003
5:09
PM
1
Electoral Engineering:
Voting Rules and Political Behavior
Pippa Norris
Harvard University
www.pippanorris.com
## email not listed ##
Synopsis: From Kosovo to Kabul, the last decade witnessed growing interest in ‘electoral
engineering’. Reformers have sought to achieve either greater government accountability
through majoritarian arrangements or wider parliamentary diversity through proportional
formula. Underlying the normative debates are important claims about the impact and
consequences of electoral reform for political representation and voting behavior. This study
compares and evaluates two broad schools of thought, each offering contrasting expectations.
One popular approach claims that formal rules define the electoral incentives facing parties,
politicians, and citizens. By changing the rules, rational choice institutionalism claims that we
have the capacity to shape political behavior among politicians and citizens. Reformers believe
that electoral engineering can solve multiple social problems, whether by mitigating ethnic
conflict, strengthening voter-party bonds, generating democratic accountability, or boosting
women’s representation. Alternative cultural modernization theories differ in their emphasis on
the primary motors driving human behavior, their expectations about the pace of change, and
also their assumptions about the ability of formal institutional rules to alter, rather than adapt
to, deeply embedded and habitual social norms and patterns of human behavior.
To consider these issues, this paper sets out the theoretical framework, derived from
the introduction to a new book ‘Electoral Engineering’ forthcoming with Cambridge University
Press, New York in Spring 2004. The book compares the consequences of electoral rules and
cultural modernization for many dimensions of political representation and voting behavior,
including issues of electoral behavior in patterns of party competition, the strength of social
cleavages and party loyalties, and levels of turnout, and questions of political representation in
the gender and ethnic diversity of parliaments, and the provision of constituency service.
Systematic evidence is drawn the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems based on surveys of
parliamentary and presidential contests held in over thirty countries ranging from the United
States, Australia and Switzerland to Peru, Taiwan and Ukraine. The book concludes that
formal rules do matter, with important implications for the choice of electoral systems.
Paper for Panel 34-6 ‘How Do Rules Matter? Electoral Systems and Voting Behavior’ at the
Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 10.00-11.45am Sunday 31
st
August 2003, Philadelphia.
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