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"From this practice stems the endemic underrepresentation of minorities in our political life. Enforcement of the Voting Rights Act has led to increased minority electoral success, but the strategy most commonly used - creation of majority-minority districts - has come under attack in the Supreme Court.".
Publisher Description
No subject is more central to the study of politics than elections. All across the globe, elections are a focal point for citizens, the media, and politicians long before--and sometimes long after--they occur. Electoral systems, the rules about how voters' preferences are translated into election results, profoundly shape the results not only of individual elections but also of many other important political outcomes, including party systems, candidate selection, and policy choices. Electoral systems have been a hot topic in established democracies from the UK and Italy to New Zealand and Japan. Even in the United States, events like the 2016 presidential election and court decisions such as Citizens United have sparked advocates to promote change in the Electoral College, redistricting, and campaign-finance rules. Elections and electoral systems have also intensified as a field of academic study, with groundbreaking work over the past decade sharpening our understanding of how electoral systems fundamentally shape the connections among citizens, government, and policy. This volume provides an in-depth exploration of the origins and effects of electoral systems.
Four laws of party seats and votes are constructed by logic and tested, using physics-like approaches which are rare in social sciences.
Personal representation is a necessary element to achieve a high quality of democracy. Many studies of electoral systems, by focusing on the allocation of seats to parties, have neglected the study of this essential dimension. In democratic countries different ballot forms and rules exist to vote for individual candidates and to allocate seats to individuals. This book studies the different voting procedures and formulas for personal representation, their origins and consequences, their compatibility with party representation and the strategies and normative criteria for electoral system choice. It presents an analytical framework, new empirical data, an innovative classification of electoral systems, and reproduction of ballots from different countries. The different chapters also offer a number of comparative and single-case studies on candidate selection and on voting in single-seat districts, closed party lists, primary elections, mixed systems, open lists with preferential votes, and open and ordinal ballots.
Although some think of proportional representation as an untried option, there were at one time twenty-two cities in the United States using proportional representation to elect their councils. Little is known about the experience of these cities, and this book seeks to fill that historical gap.
In any democracy, the central problem of governance is how to inform, organize, and represent the opinions of the public in order to advance three goals: popular control over leaders, equality among citizens, and competent governance. In most political analyses, voting is emphasized as the central and essential process in achieving these goals. Yet democratic representation encompasses a great deal more than voter beliefs and behavior and, indeed, involves much more than the machinery of elections. Democracy requires government agencies that respond to voter decisions, a civil society in which powerful organized interests do not dominate all others, and communication systems that permit divergent voices to be heard. Representation: Elections and Beyond brings together leading international scholars from a wide range of disciplines to explore the twenty-first-century innovations—in voting laws and practices, in electoral systems, in administrative, political, and civil organizations, and in communication processes and new technologies—that are altering how we understand democratic representation. Featuring twelve essays that engage with national, provincial, and municipal governments across three continents, this volume tackles traditional core elements of democratic representation, such as voting, electoral systems, and political parties, while also underscoring the ways in which beliefs and preferences of citizens are influenced, expressed, and aggregated and the effects of those methods and practices on political agendas and policy outcomes. In pinpointing deficiencies in contemporary democratic practices and possibilities for reform, Representation provides an invaluable roadmap to improve democratic representation in the twenty-first century. Contributors: André Blais, Pradeep Chhibber, Archon Fung, Jacob Hacker, Zoltan Hajnal, Matthew Hindman, David Karpf, Georgia Kernell, Alexander Keyssar, Anthony McGann, Susan Ostermann, Paul Pierson, Dennis Thompson, Jessica Trounstine, Mark E. Warren.
This book highlights how new and established democracies differ from one another in the effects of their electoral rules.