This study examines if prime minister's parties are punished or rewarded by voters to a lesser extent in candidate‐centred electoral systems compared to party‐centred systems. Candidate‐centred systems allow the voters greater choice in determining the fate of individual candidates at the district level and create incentives for candidates to cultivate a personal vote rather than pursuing a party vote. Voters in these systems are more likely to focus on individual candidates than on parties, thus fostering individual accountability at the expense of collective (party) accountability. Cross‐sectional time‐series data for 23 OECD countries between 1961 and 2014 were analysed. Two indices of intraparty efficiency (the Farrell–McAllister Index and the Shugart Index) were used to capture the candidate‐centredness of electoral systems. The analysis of aggregate‐level data with almost 300 observations showed that incumbent parties tend to win or lose fewer votes in candidate‐centred electoral systems. This effect has become stronger over time. Candidate‐centredness has a weak moderating impact on the state of the economy on the degree of public sanctioning of government parties.

Party identification is a well‐documented force in political behaviour. However, the vast majority of work on partisanship considers only its positive side, rather than recognizing that partisan identities may also have a negative component. Recent work has shown that negative partisanship has important effects, such as reinforcing partisan leanings, directing strategic behaviour and increasing the rate of straight‐ticket voting. This study takes a step back to explore the sources of such orientations, rather than the effects. Specifically, it considers whether the electoral system context contributes to the presence of negative affective orientations towards parties. Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, we examine the influence of factors related to electoral system features and consider whether their influence is moderated by voter sophistication. Data reveal significant variation in the rate of negative partisanship across countries, and that these differences are related to the electoral system context in which voters are making decisions. We also find some evidence that these effects are moderated by sophistication. This work adds to our understanding of the role of affect in political behaviour, as well as the impact that country‐level institutional factors can have upon the relationship between voters and parties.

This article investigates whether the smaller gender gaps in political engagement, found in more proportional electoral systems, translate into smaller gender differences in political participation. Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, it presents the argument that more proportional systems may send signals that multiple interests are included in the policy‐making process, which may increase women's levels of political participation and thereby reduce gender gaps. Additionally, the article tests for the possibility that a greater number of political parties and the elected representatives they provide act as barriers to political participation that have a greater impact on women's levels of participation than men's. It is argued that women's lower levels of political resources and engagement might create more difficult barriers for them than for men. Results lend little support for the first hypothesis, but a greater confirmation for the second.

One of the limits of previous studies using respondents’ self‐placements and subjective party placements to examine levels of citizen‐government congruence is that they were limited to the post‐1995 period. This article extends the number of elections where it is possible to examine levels of citizen‐government ideological congruence with a survey‐based approach. In particular, a unique dataset has been collected that combines data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and several national election studies. The results confirm recent studies that show that levels of citizen‐government ideological congruence are similar under majoritarian and proportional representation (PR) systems. Such studies, however, did not provide evidence that congruence is maintained over the course of a government's mandate. This article introduces, therefore, two measures of citizen‐government congruence that address this issue and that may revive the debate about which electoral systems strengthen the citizen‐government connection: citizen‐government congruence at the end of government mandates and change in congruence between elections. The results indicate that governments stay closer to the median citizens between elections under PR systems than under majoritarian systems. It is found, however, that this decrease in congruence in majoritarian systems is not detrimental to the point of observing smaller levels of congruence at the end of government mandates under majoritarian systems than under PR systems.

The literature on party system nationalisation has yet to provide a better understanding of the impact of short‐term factors upon the nationalisation of politics. This article helps to fill this literature gap by analysing the effect of economic conditions on party system nationalisation. The argument is that economic crises will decrease levels of nationalisation by amplifying territorial variation in preferences for redistribution, limiting political parties’ capacity to coordinate divergent interests across districts and triggering the emergence of new political forces. Data on 47 countries for the 1960–2011 period confirm this hypothesis and show that lower economic growth during the years prior to the election is associated with a decrease in levels of party system nationalisation in the next election. The result is robust to variation in the specification of the econometric model and to the use of different measures of nationalisation. Results also show that federal institutions increase the impact of economic conditions on the nationalisation of politics, whereas any moderating effect of electoral system proportionality on the economy is not found.

Legislative debates are a thriving field in comparative politics. They make representation work by offering legislators the opportunity to take the floor and represent their constituents. In this paper, we review the key theoretical concepts and empirical findings in a maturing field. We begin by addressing what legislative debates are and why we should study them to learn about inter‐ and intra‐party politics. Next, we look at the contributions springing from Proksch and Slapin's ground‐breaking model. In so doing, our review suggests that recent work extends the original model to include further dimensions of legislative debates. Third, we examine the role of legislative debates as mechanisms of representation, focusing on gender. Four, we examine the challenges of the comparative analysis of legislative debates. Finally, we map the road ahead by discussing four avenues of future research and some key questions that remain unanswered.

Most accounts of electoral system change tend to consider it as being driven by purely partisan interests. Political parties are expected to change the electoral rules as a way to maximise gains or minimise losses. However, little work has been done on the question of why electoral reforms are so scarce in spite of these potential benefits. In this study, a wide range of both factors that may foster (‘catalysts’) and ones that may hinder (‘barriers’) the change of electoral institutions are investigated. A statistical analysis is performed of 16 West European countries from 1975 to 2005, covering 23 reforms of the proportionality of their electoral systems. It is found that procedural barriers are more effective for explaining the likelihood of electoral reforms than (most of) the catalysts. Additionally, there are indications that courts may play a more active role in triggering reform than previously thought.

When it comes to the impact of institutions such as electoral systems, parliamentary or presidential systems and executive–legislature relations, political science has predominately been preoccupied with their political effects, such as whether they lead to two-party or multi-party systems and whether stable governments result. What has been less discussed and researched are the policy implications of different electoral systems. Do they lead to more economic growth? Does Proportional Representation lead to higher budget deficits? Do majoritarian systems lead to more or less political violence? The shortage of research analysing these questions is surprising. This article critically outlines the research to date, summarises the main results and points to methodological problems in the literature before it outlines a framework for future research analysing how the choice of electoral system affects policy output. The main recommendation is that, before trying to connect policy outputs to broad labels such as ‘Proportional Representation’, which can cover significantly different systems, one should investigate the connection of policy outputs to intervening variables such as the effective number of parties and the mean duration of cabinets.

There is an assumption in much of the electoral engineering literature that domestic episodes of electoral system choice occur in a vacuum, isolated from international influences. Yet this assumption remains largely untested, despite the comparative focus of much of that literature. This article focuses on part of this gap by considering two electoral mechanisms that seek to limit party system fragmentation under proportional representation – low district magnitudes and high electoral thresholds – and shows that the mechanisms have spread across many European countries during the post‐1945 period. Analyses reveal that national legislators are more likely to adopt one of these electoral mechanisms when a large number of peer countries have made similar choices within the last two or three years. This effect is robust to various model specifications and to the inclusion of multiple controls. The article also offers some qualitative evidence from case studies and parliamentary debates.

An intense scholarly and public policy debate concerns the optimal design of institutions for new democracies, particularly those facing deep ethnic or cultural cleavages. This paper surveys the main contending models that have been advanced for ethnically diverse democracies – consociationalism, centripetalism and communalism – and examines the key components of each of those models. It then explores some aspects of their application, arguing that there is much more cross-over between the models than is commonly assumed.

A large set of research argues that policy responsiveness towards excluded societal factions such as minorities of immigrant origin improves through the presence of group members in parliaments because they bring forward different perspectives during parliamentary debates. This article challenges the straightforwardness of this relationship by demonstrating that the ability of legislators with immigrant backgrounds to shift the parliamentary agenda closer to the ideal points of citizens of foreign descent is conditional on two factors. First, representatives of immigrant origin need incentives to cultivate a personal vote, and second, their overall proportion of parliamentary seats has to remain rather marginal to influence the policy positions of the majority of representatives. The article's findings thus stress the importance of studying the contextual factors that moderate the relationship between group belonging and the capacity to promote group interests. Empirical evidence from nine European Democracies between 2002 and 2014 substantiates this argument – so that the analysis constitutes the first cross‐country comparison in a research field that has so far been dominated by single country studies. By using policy congruence as a measure for responsiveness, this article shifts the focal point from individual representatives’ attempts to promote the interests of citizens with immigrant backgrounds towards effectiveness of these endeavours.

It is well known that individuals who voted for the winning party in an election tend to be more satisfied with democracy than those who did not. However, many winners deviate from their first choice when voting. It is argued in this article that the mechanisms that engender satisfaction operate less forcefully among such winners, thereby lessening the impact of victory on satisfaction. Results show that the gap in satisfaction over electoral losers among these ‘non‐optimal winners’ is, in fact, much smaller than that of ‘optimal winners’, who voted in line with their expressed preferences. A win matters more for those who have a bigger stake in victory. The article further explores how the effect of optimal victory on satisfaction varies across electoral systems.

This study analyses why income inequality and party polarisation proceed together in some countries but not in others. By focusing on the relationship between income inequality, the permissiveness of electoral systems and party polarisation, the study offers a theoretical explanation for how the combination of income inequality and permissive electoral systems generates higher party polarisation. After analysing a cross‐national dataset of party polarisation, income inequality and electoral institutions covering 24 advanced democracies between 1960 and 2011, it is found that a simple correlation between income inequality and party polarisation is not strong. However, the empirical results indicate that greater income inequality under permissive electoral systems contributes to growing party polarisation, which suggests that parties only have diverging ideological platforms due to greater income inequality when electoral systems encourage their moves towards the extreme; parties do not diverge when electoral systems discourage their moves towards the extreme.

This article develops and tests a number of competing expectations (institutional, party and individual) about what influenced the campaign activity of individual parliamentary candidates for the 2004 European Parliament elections. The principal interest is in the effects of variations in the design of electoral institutions across the Member States of the European Union. Based on the analysis, it is argued that an important distinction needs to be made between campaign effort and campaign goals, with electoral institutional factors having a more significant role over the latter.

Legislators are political actors whose main goal is to get re‐elected. They use their legislative repertoire to help them cater to the interests of their principals. It is argued in this article that we need to move beyond treating electoral systems as monolithic entities, as if all legislators operating under the same set of macro‐rules shared the same set of incentives. Rather, we need to account for within‐system variation – namely, candidate selection rules and individual electoral vulnerability. Using a most different systems design, Germany, Ireland and Portugal are leveraged with both cross‐system and within‐system variation. An original dataset of 345,000 parliamentary questions is used. Findings show that candidate selection rules blur canonical electoral system boundaries. Electoral vulnerability has a similar effect in closed‐list and mixed systems, but not in preferential voting settings.

Why do prime ministers or presidents appoint non‐elected experts, also known as technocrats, during economic crises? Do they appoint them for their expertise or for their commitment to pro‐market reforms? Answering this question is crucial for understanding and predicting the longer‐term role of technocrats in democracies. With the aid of unique data on the political and personal background of finance ministers in 13 parliamentary and semi‐presidential European democracies this article shows that commitment, not expertise is the primary driver of technocratic appointments during major economic crises. Technocrats are preferred over experienced politicians when the latter lack commitment to policy reform. An important implication of the findings is that technocratic appointments to top economic portfolios in West European countries are unlikely to become the norm outside economic crises, assuming economic crises are short‐lived and not recurring.

Militant democracy is the prevailing model for defending democracies against anti-democratic political parties. This article evaluates the militant democracy model, classifying the prohibition of political parties as its “hard” version, and the regulation of political parties and their members as its “soft” version. It then compares this with an alternative model, termed strategic democracy. Unlike militant democracy, which controls the supply side by abolishing anti-democratic parties, strategic democracy focuses on the demand side.

From a rule of law perspective, it will be argued that strategic democracy does not infringe on political rights, provides greater legal certainty, and aligns with the concept of tolerant democracy. Practically speaking, the strategic democracy model is considered more efficient as it leverages electoral systems where political parties, such as the parties against democracy, which in principle have more enemies than supporters, are effectively ostracized.

Redistricting is often a hotly contested affair within states as the party in power attempts to maximize its chances for electoral success through injecting partisanship into the process. Previous works have evaluated how different redistricting practices can influence elections, but little is known about how redistricting can impact citizen attitudes toward government. Using an original survey with a unique experiment, we evaluate the relationship between how redistricting is performed and how satisfied citizens are with the state of democracy in the United States. We find that the mere perception of redistricting being done in a partisan manner leads to decreased levels of system support. Furthermore, our models show that independent redistricting commissions tend to reduce the perceived prevalence of gerrymandering and boost citizens’ evaluations of the democratic process.

This research note traces the evolution of Sartori's theoretical reflection on the party system, primarily by describing the relationship between “format and mechanics” to assess its explanatory power. The main conclusion of the analysis is that Sartori's framework has all the elements of an empirical party system theory. A systemic theory of party relations does not have to explain party behaviour but only the combined effect, in terms of the system's mechanics, of all party actions. Thus, the theory states that the number of parties and their positioning in the unidimensional competitive space cause the system's mechanics. The dependent variable is ordinal, about the quantitative and qualitative distribution of power among the parties. This detracts from the parsimony of the theory and requires other independent or at least intervening variables besides the number of parties: ideological distance and direction of competition. This difference notwithstanding, we can still accept Sartori's framework as a general party system theory. Appropriate mid or lower-range theories could supplement the general one in explaining sub-systemic phenomena. Irrespective of whether we call it a classification, a framework or a theory, Sartori's contribution remains a fundamental milestone in the study of parties and party systems.