Reconsidering Representation: How Electoral Districts Shape Party Systems

Objective

An electoral system is an essential component of representative democracy. It translates preferences
of citizens to a legislative body and inevitably distorts preferences, voicing some more loudly than others.
Theorizing and empirically analyzing how the electoral system tilts the playing ground is the aim of this
study.
The number of seats allotted to an electoral district—the district magnitude (DM)—is perhaps the
most important component defining an electoral system. It is long established that DM affects key features
of the political landscape in a country, such as representation, the number of parties, the type of government
(single- or multi-party coalition), parties’ strategy, voters’ consideration, and even redistribution policy.
Most democracies, however, have districts of many different magnitudes, and the range often reaches thirty
seats gap between the smallest and largest districts in a country. Districts in Portugal, for instance, vary
between two and forty-eight seats, and in Switzerland between one and thirty-five. The voluminous
literature on electoral districts uniformly sidesteps this heterogeneity, focusing instead on a single middle
district per country.
The proposed study is the first large-scale study that theorizes about and empirically analyzes the
effects of within-country district structure. I address questions such as: how does district heterogeneity
shape representation at the national level? How does it affect the party system? And how does it affect party
coordination?
In the first part of the study I will theorize about various aspects of district heterogeneity in a country
(e.g. skewness, effective number of magnitudes). I will gain deep understanding for district distributions
and develop politically-relevant measures of heterogeneity. Drawing on insights from the theoretical part,
the second part will empirically examine how district heterogeneity affects the political landscape, and in
particular representation, party system, and party coordination. This part relies on extensive district- and
national-level data collection and data analysis in OECD countries as well as in-depth case analysis.
Analyzing the effect of district heterogeneity on representation, party systems, and party
coordination will open new avenues of research about design of electoral systems.

Fields of science

Funding Scheme

ERC-SG - ERC Starting Grant

Host institution

THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM

EU contribution

€ 1 038 686,00

Address

EDMOND J SAFRA CAMPUS GIVAT RAM
91904 Jerusalem
Israel

Activity type

Higher or Secondary Education Establishments

Principal investigator

Orit Kedar (Prof.)

Administrative Contact

Hani Ben-Yehuda (Ms.)

Links

Contact the organisation Website

Total cost

No data

Beneficiaries (1)