School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemPolitical economy of electoral systems: electoral disproportionality, its measurement and its effect on economic inequality in democracies( 2019)Political parties represent social classes with conflicting interests. Electoral systems have direct and indirect consequences for the parties’ access to the decision-making power. A major outcome of the distribution of political power among parties is the distribution of economic resources between competing social groups. Contributing to a growing body of empirical work on the fiscal outcomes of the electoral systems, this study examines the nature of the relationship between the electoral systems and the level of economic inequality in representative democracies. This question is examined through cross-country comparisons on a global scale using cross-sectional and longitudinal data and various statistical methods. This study uses ‘electoral disproportionality’ as a widely-popularized continuous metric to distinguish between electoral systems. Electoral disproportionality maybe broadly defined as the deviation of the post-election party seat-shares in a parliament and the pre-election composition of the party preferences of the voting age population. As its first major step, this study proposes a new index (called 𝐷a for measuring electoral disproportionality to addresses certain disadvantages of the existing indices. In real elections, parties adjust their campaign strategies in part in anticipation of the implications of the electoral rules for their chance of success. Similarly, citizens tactically adjust their voting decisions to maximize the impact of their vote or choose not to vote at all. Commonly, electoral disproportionality is calculated empirically using the outcomes of the past elections. However, due to the behavioural adjustments of the parties and voters, the use of election data often results in an overestimation or underestimation of electoral disproportionality. To eschew the adverse effect of behavioural adjustments on the measurement of electoral disproportionality, this study, as its second major step, introduces and operationalises the novel concept of systemic electoral disproportionality. It also develops a methodology based on computer simulation for the measurement of systemic disproportionality. This measurement technique, offers the capability to decompose systemic electoral disproportionality between the various components of an electoral system (districting, electoral formula, thresholds, etc.). At its third major step, using the proposed measurement technique and index, this research, for the first time, produces data on the current level of systemic electoral disproportionality in 92 democracies around the world. Finally, and as its fourth major step, this research uses the generated dataset of systemic electoral disproportionality in several statistical modellings covering the period 1978 to 2015 to study the relationship between the electoral systems and income inequality. OLS, fixedeffects and between effects regression models are utilized to test the hypotheses. Results of the worldwide cross-country comparisons indicate that increase in systemic electoral disproportionality does not aggravate the level of net income inequality per se. Instead, as democracies mature, the level of systemic electoral disproportionality aligns with the level of diversification of the party system. The latter is shown to be in relationship with cross-country variation in the level of inequality of the disposable income. Findings emphasize the role of party diversification as a causal nexus between the type of the electoral system and the level of economic inequality.