In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 9 Legislative Elections More-or-less independent theories of committee choice, coalition building or electoral behavior surely contribute to our understanding of how the details of political institutions affect policy choice, yet most policy outcomes are the result of a legislative coalition or committee decision procedure (such as those studied in earlier chapters) involving elected representatives from several geographic districts or political parties. Thus, rational policy-motivated voters take into account the likely legislative consequences of voting one way rather than another in elections. In turn, rational candidates or parties take account of such deliberations when deciding on their electoral strategies and subsequent legislative behavior, conditional on winning at least some degree of representation in the legislature. To explain the distributions of party platforms and electoral votes in legislative elections, therefore, it is necessary first to characterize how such distributions map into final legislative policy outcomes. Although surely relevant to any multimember legislative election, the preceding remarks are especially salient with respect to parliamentary systems . Whereas, in almost all such systems, simple majority or plurality rule is predominantly used for making decisions within the elected legislature, the election of the legislature per se from among the various competing parties and candidates is decided by some form of proportional representation rule. While a party may indeed secure an overall majority within the elected legislature, this is only one of many possible distributions of legislative seats, most of which involve no one party winning a clear majority. And in the absence of a single party with a legislative majority, policy decisions are not necessarily electoral platforms but rather the result of bargaining among members of some post-election coalition government. 391 392 CHAPTER 9. LEGISLATIVE ELECTIONS There are a myriad ways, both in principle and in fact, for elections and legislatures to be organized. Nevertheless, in this chapter we consider a stylized sequential model of parliamentary democracy in which three homogenous parties compete for legislative representation in a pure proportional voting election; once the composition of the elected legislature is determined, legislative bargaining under a given protocol determines the governing coalition and consequent policy choice. Much of the subtlety inherent in institutional variation is clearly finessed by such a stylized model, as is our earlier concern with candidate entry. The goal, however, is not to provide a comprehensive positive theory of representative democracy, but to connect some of the central themes of earlier chapters and develop a broader intuition for how legislative and electoral incentives interact. 9.1 Elections, government and policy Three homogenous parties, l, m, r, compete for legislative representation over a one-dimensional policy space, X = [;r, x]. An electoral strategy for c E {l, m, r} is a platform choice, ae E X. To avoid complications with integer problems in allocating a finite number of legislative seats, we suppose the election is by pure proportional representation with no abstention. Given any profile of electoral policy platforms a = (ai, am, ar ) E X3 and party c E {l, m, r}, let Vc(a) E [0, 1] denote c's realized electoral vote share. It is both unreasonable and implausible that simply voting for oneself suffices for a seat in the post-election legislature. Consequently, to achieve any positive level of legislative influence, a party is assumed to require at least a minimal proportion of electoral support, s E (0,1/4), where s is supposed bounded away from zero. So for each party c and distribution of vote shares V = (Vi, Vm,Vr), let we(V) E [0,1] be c's legislative weight; then we(V) = ° if Ve "2}' eEL 9.1. ELECTIONS, GOVERNMENT AND POLICY 393 Clearly, if W c > 1/2 for some party c, then {c} E .c and c constitutes the government, controlling all legislative decisions. But in case no party is decisive on its own then, by full participation, all parties must have legislative representation (Vc ~ s for all c) and any government involves a coalition of at least two parties. Following an election, government formation and legislative decisions are decided through a fixed sequential bargaining protocol involving only those parties with positive weight, W c > 0. As discussed in some detail in Chapter 6, there are many possible bargaining protocols. Here, we adopt a particular finite bargaining sequence that reveals the relevant incentives in an analytically tractable way without doing obvious damage to empirical reality. Specifically, given a list of legislative weights w > 0, the protocol gives the party with the...

Share