(Page 19 of 43) - Electoral Engineering: Electoral Rules and Voting Choices authored by Norris, Pippa.

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electoral data. Module 1 of the CSES (released in July 2002) used in this study allows us to
compare surveys of a representative cross-section of the electorate in 37 legislative and
presidential national elections in 32 countries. The geographic coverage includes countries
containing in total over 1.2 million inhabitants, or one fifth of the world’s population. The
focus on voters’ choices, the cross-national integration, and above all the timing of the data
collection (within a year following each of the elections), provide a unique opportunity to
compare voting behavior in a way that is not possible through other common sources of
comparative data such as the World Values Survey. Throughout the book, the national
elections under comparison are those held from 1996-2001 for the lower house of the national
parliament and for presidential contests. The definition and typology of electoral systems is
discussed in detail in the next chapter and the main contrasts among nations are illustrated in
Table 1.1.

[Table 1.1 about here]

Comparative framework

Many previous studies have commonly adopted a ‘most similar’ comparative

framework, seeking to consider patterns of electoral behavior within Western Europe, or post-
Communist Europe, or Latin America, or within the universe of established democracies. This
approach helps isolate the effects of different electoral rules from certain common historical
traditions, shared cultural values, or political experiences, but nevertheless it remains difficult to
generalize from any particular regional context, for example for any lessons derived from new
democracies in Latin America that might also hold in Central and Eastern Europe. This is
particularly problematic if one wants to test the effects of societal modernization and electoral
rules on voting behavior in both older and newer democracies. For example, Lijphart’s theory
claims that PR elections lead towards greater long-term democratic stability in deeply-divided
plural societies, yet this cannot be tested effectively if studies are limited to the comparison of
older democracies which have persisted uninterrupted in recent decades, rather than examining
the characteristics of a wide range of political systems that have, and have not, undergone major
regime change

Given these considerations, and the nature of the primary CSES dataset, the

comparative framework in this book adopts instead the ‘most different’ comparative
framework

. The study focuses upon how far certain patterns of voting behavior and political

representation are systematically related to either levels of societal modernization (in industrial
v. postindustrial societies) or to types of electoral systems (majoritarian, combined or
proportional). This approach also carries certain well-known difficulties, particularly the
familiar problem of too many variables and too few cases. Multiple contrasts can be drawn
among the countries under comparison, ranging from Australia, the United States and Sweden
to the Ukraine, Peru and Taiwan. As a result it remains difficult to establish whether the
outcomes can indeed be attributed to the selected factors under comparison (societal
modernization or the type of electoral rules), or if these relationships are spurious due to
omitted variables not included in our simple models, such as the role of economic inequality,
the history of military coups in Latin America, the legacy of Communism in Central and
Eastern Europe, or religious traditions in Asia. The ‘controls’ introduced into the multivariate
models can provide only rough proxies for a few of the multiple cross-national differences
among political systems around the world. The limited number of elections and countries
inevitably restricts the reliability of the generalizations that can be drawn from the study.