2
Voter Satisfaction and Electoral Systems: Does Preferential
Voting in Candidate-Centred Systems Make a Difference?
Since the onset of the current wave of democratization, there has been a
growing interest in researching the institutional factors underlying citizen support for
democracy. This has also, in part, reflected a renewed scholarly interest in seeking
answers to the questions of whether and how institutions ‘matter’ (Weaver and
Rockman 1993)—in this instance, with regard to the theme of democratic stability.
Of all the institutions that may matter, few would deny that electoral systems are
among the most significant. They are the central institutional design issue for a new
polity to resolve (e.g. Sartori 1997; Taagepera 2002); and they are also among the
most malleable of the political institutions, a point first stressed by Sartori, who wrote
of the electoral system as ‘the most specific manipulative instrument of politics’
(1968: 273). Certainly, when compared with the other fundamental institutional
decisions of a polity (such as, for instance, deciding between presidentialism and
parliamentarism), electoral systems are generally far easier to change because, on the
whole, they tend not to be constitutionally embedded and are therefore more open to
the whims of politicians (Bowler, Carter and Farrell 2003).
Electoral system design may be perceived as important by academic scholars
and electoral engineers (Lijphart 1994; Reynolds 2002; Sartori 1997; Taagepera and
Shugart 1989), but what tangible evidence is there of an electoral system actually
making a difference to democratic stability? Developments in large-scale cross-
national surveys have facilitated research into this question, with much of it focused
on Arend Lijphart’s well-known framework distinguishing between majoritarian and
consensual democracies (Lijphart 1999). Under this framework, the electoral system
is treated as a core variable and is operationalized in terms of its vote-aggregation
properties as more or less proportional. The basis of Lijphart’s argument with regard
to electoral systems is that proportional systems are better than non-proportional
systems because they facilitate the representation of all relevant societal and ethnic
groupings.
There is more to this argument than theoretical conjecture. In the penultimate
two chapters of his Patterns of Democracy (1999), Lijphart provides detailed
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