I consider the decision of a parliament that might change the electoral system for the forthcoming elections from plurality rule to proportional representation. Parties are o¢ ce-motivated. They care about winning and about the share of seats obtained. I consider two di¤erent scenarios of how parties in the government share the spoils of o¢ ce: Equally or proportionally to their share of seats. If the government is formed by a single party and parties expect that each party will obtain the same share of votes in the next election the electoral rule will never be changed. That is, for a change to occur the government should be formed by a coalition. I ?nd that a change is more likely to occur when the number of parties is larger and also when the spoils of o¢ ce are shared equally among the members in the governing coalition. I extend these results to analyze the decision of a change from a less proportional rule to a more proportional one.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Department of Economic Theory and Economic History of the University of Granada. in its series ThE Papers with number
08/07.
Find related papers by JEL classification: D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Models of Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior H10 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government - - - General
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: