IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ise/isegwp/wp132007.html

Citizens’ Freedom to Choose Representatives: Ballot Structure, Proportionality and “Fragmented” Parliaments

Author

Listed:
  • Paulo Trigo Pereira
  • João Andrade e Silva

Abstract

The analysis of the political consequences of electoral laws has emphasized how individual characteristics of the electoral system (electoral formulas, district magnitude, ballot structure) affect the degree of parliament “fragmentation” and proportionality. This paper argues that the personal attributes of representatives are also an important consequence of electoral laws, and that they are in part determined by citizens’ freedom to choose representatives. We clarify this concept and develop an index of citizens’ freedom to choose members of parliament as a function of the ballot structure, district size and electoral formulae. Using data from twenty nine countries, we find that neither proportionality nor the effective number of parties is significantly affected by voters’ freedom of choice. This result has important normative implications for electoral reform.

Suggested Citation

  • Paulo Trigo Pereira & João Andrade e Silva, 2007. "Citizens’ Freedom to Choose Representatives: Ballot Structure, Proportionality and “Fragmented” Parliaments," Working Papers Department of Economics 2007/13, ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, Department of Economics, Universidade de Lisboa.
    • Handle: RePEc:ise:isegwp:wp132007
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://depeco.iseg.ulisboa.pt/wp/wp132007.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Carles Boix, 1999. "Setting the rules of the game: The choice of electoral systems in advanced democracies," Economics Working Papers 367, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
    2. Boix, Carles, 1999. "Setting the Rules of the Game: The Choice of Electoral Systems in Advanced Democracies," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 93(3), pages 609-624, September.
    3. Prasanta K. PATTANAIK & Yongsheng XU, 1990. "On Ranking Opportunity Sets in Terms of Freedom of Choice," Discussion Papers (REL - Recherches Economiques de Louvain) 1990036, Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES).
    4. Taagepera, Rein & Shugart, Matthew Soberg, 1993. "Predicting the Number of Parties: A Quantitative Model of Duverger's Mechanical Effect," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 87(2), pages 455-464, June.
    5. Loosemore, John & Hanby, Victor J., 1971. "The Theoretical Limits of Maximum Distortion: Some Analytic Expressions for Electoral Systems," British Journal of Political Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 1(4), pages 467-477, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Paulo T. Pereira, & Lara Wemans,, 2012. "Portugal and the Global Financial Crisis – short-sighted politics, deteriorating public finances and the bailout imperative," Working Papers Department of Economics 2012/26, ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, Department of Economics, Universidade de Lisboa.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Eduardo Álvarez-Miranda & Camilo Campos-Valdés & Maurcio Morales Quiroga & Matías Moreno-Faguett & Jordi Pereira, 2020. "A Multi-Criteria Pen for Drawing Fair Districts: When Democratic and Demographic Fairness Matter," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 8(9), pages 1-26, August.
    2. Stefan Voigt, 2011. "Positive constitutional economics II—a survey of recent developments," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 146(1), pages 205-256, January.
    3. Skye Christensen & Gabrielle Bardall, 2014. "Gender Quotas in Single-Member District Electoral Systems," RSCAS Working Papers 2014/104, European University Institute.
    4. Maria Rosaria Alfano & Anna Laura Baraldi & Erasmo Papagni, 2016. "Effect of the proportionality degree of electoral systems on corruption," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 34(8), pages 1895-1916, December.
    5. Timothy Besley & Torsten Persson, 2011. "Pillars of Prosperity: The Political Economics of Development Clusters," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 9624, December.
    6. Carlos Scartascini & Mariano Tommasi & Ernesto Stein, 2010. "Veto Players and Policy Trade-Offs- An Intertemporal Approach to Study the Effects of Political Institutions on Policy," Research Department Publications 4660, Inter-American Development Bank, Research Department.
    7. Albertus, Michael & Menaldo, Victor & Rojas-Vallejos, Jorge, 2025. "Why elites sometimes undo their own constitutional privileges," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 192(C).
    8. Paola Profeta & Eleanor Woodhouse, 2018. "Do Electoral Rules Matter for Female Representation?," Working Papers 121, "Carlo F. Dondena" Centre for Research on Social Dynamics (DONDENA), Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi.
    9. Isa Camyar & Bahar Ulupinar, 2019. "Electoral systems and the economy: a firm-level analysis," Constitutional Political Economy, Springer, vol. 30(1), pages 1-30, March.
    10. Konstantinos Matakos & Dimitrios Xefteris, 2015. "Strategic electoral rule choice under uncertainty," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 162(3), pages 329-350, March.
    11. Gerard Alexander, 2001. "Institutions, Path Dependence, and Democratic Consolidation," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 13(3), pages 249-269, July.
    12. Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe, 2020. "Academics and Election Administration in Nigeria," Journal of International Development, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 32(7), pages 1009-1032, October.
    13. Tridimas, George, 2011. "Cleisthenes’ Choice: The Emergence of Direct Democracy in Ancient Athens," The Journal of Economic Asymmetries, Elsevier, vol. 8(1), pages 39-59.
    14. Izaskun Zuazu, 2022. "Electoral systems and income inequality: a tale of political equality," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 63(2), pages 793-819, August.
    15. Selim Ergun, 2010. "From plurality rule to proportional representation," Economics of Governance, Springer, vol. 11(4), pages 373-408, November.
    16. Massimiliano Vatiero, 2017. "On The (Political) Origin Of ‘Corporate Governance’ Species," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 31(2), pages 393-409, April.
    17. Satya R. Chakravarty & Manipushpak Mitra & Suresh Mutuswami & Rupayan Pal, 2020. "On the probability ratio index as a measure of electoral competition," Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 6(1), pages 1-6, December.
    18. Aidt, T.S. & Jensen, P.S., 2012. "From Open to Secret Ballot: Vote Buying and Modernization," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 1221, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    19. Alexander S Kirshner, 2018. "Nonideal democratic authority," Politics, Philosophy & Economics, , vol. 17(3), pages 257-276, August.
    20. Kathryn Hochstetler, 2012. "Civil society and the regulatory state of the South: A commentary," Regulation & Governance, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 6(3), pages 362-370, September.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ise:isegwp:wp132007. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Vitor Escaria (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://aquila.iseg.ulisboa.pt/aquila/departamentos/EC .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.