Browsing by Author "Fortin-Rittberger, Jessica"

While electoral research has become one of political science’s most fertile areas, to date no empirical contribution has addressed the three mechanisms of the electoral chain – strategic entry, strategic voting, and the electoral system’s mechanical effect – in a unified analytical framework. This paper addresses this shortcoming by analysing the effect of electoral systems on party system size, accounting for all three mechanisms. Our study yields three major findings drawing on constituency-level data covering 462 electoral districts in Finland and Portugal between 1962 and 2011. First, macro-sociological context, measured as cleavages, operate at the district level: An increase in the heterogeneity within a constituency significantly increases party system size. Second, in the two established democracies we examine, we observe that district-level bottom-up coordination takes places. Finally, while our analyses reveal that some strategic voting takes places, it is blurred by a comparatively large amount of non-strategic behaviour by voters. The variance we find surrounding psychological effects is too large to exert a targeted impact. In sum, the mechanical effect turns out to be the most decisive link of the electoral chain.

Previous research has shown that voters' perception of electoral fairness has an impact on their attitudes and behaviors. However, less research has attempted to link objective measurements of electoral integrity on voters' attitudes about the democratic process. Drawing on data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and the Quality of Elections Data, we investigate whether cross-national differences in electoral integrity have significant influences on citizens' level of satisfaction with democracy. We hypothesize that higher levels of observed electoral fraud will have a negative impact on evaluations of the democratic process, and that this effect will be mediated by a respondent's status as a winner or loser of an election. The article's main finding is that high levels of electoral fraud are indeed linked to less satisfaction with democracy. However, we show that winning only matters in elections that are conducted in an impartial way. The moment elections start to display the telltale signs of manipulation and malpractice, winning and losing no longer have different effects on voter's levels of satisfaction with democracy.