No abstract

According to the minority empowerment thesis, minority representation strengthens representational links, fosters more positive attitudes toward government, and encourages political participation. We examine this theory from a cross‐national perspective, making use of surveys that sampled minorities in the United States and New Zealand. Both countries incorporate structures into their electoral systems that make it possible for minority groups to elect representatives of their choice. We find that in both countries descriptive representation matters: it increases knowledge about and contact with representatives in the U.S. and leads to more positive evaluations of governmental responsiveness and increased electoral participation in New Zealand. These findings have broad implications for debates about minority representation.

Theory and evidence suggests that respondents are likely to overreport voter turnout in election surveys because they have a strong incentive to offer a socially desirable response. We suggest that contextual influences may affect the socially desirable bias, leading to variance in the rate of overreporting across countries. This leads us to hypothesize that nonvoters will be more likely to overreport voting in elections that have high turnout. We rely on validated turnout data to measure overreporting in five countries which vary a great deal in turnout: Britain, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United States. We find that in national settings with higher levels of participation, the tendency to overreport turnout may be greater than in settings where low participation is the norm.

Advocates of proportional representation (PR) often cite its potential for increasing citizen involvement in politics as one of PR's fundamental advantages over plurality or first-past-the-post systems. The assumption is that plurality electoral systems distort the translation of votes into seats, discouraging and alienating small party supporters and other political minorities. In contrast, PR systems are believed to provide greater opportunities for representation which are assumed to instil greater efficacy and increase participation. We examine this theory linking institutions to electoral participation across a diverse set of countries using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. Using a multi-level approach we find evidence consistent with the expectations about the negative influence of disproportional systems on political minorities. Voters are also likely to have stronger partisan preferences in PR systems, which enhances political efficacy and increases voter participation. The effects of PR, however, are not all positive; broad coalitions, which are likely to be a feature of these systems, reduce political efficacy.While the size of the advantage tends to vary, most of the research on electoral systems and turnout agrees that proportional representation (PR) systems have a turnout advantage. Although any one vote is unlikely to be decisive in an election, electoral systems can alter the degree to which votes can matter. Votes for minor parties in PR systems are likely to matter more in determining the overall partisan distribution of seats in a legislature than in plurality systems where minor parties often find it difficult to translate their votes into seats. Past research on electoral systems and turnout has assumed that the disproportionality between seats and votes in plurality systems instils in voters the feeling that their vote does not matter, and, as a result, they are less likely to vote. As such, attitudes towards the likely impact of one's vote are assumed to act as an intervening variable between electoral rules and electoral participation. The extant comparative literature, however, has relied almost entirely on aggregate data to examine the influence of electoral systems on voter turnout and, therefore, has never explicitly measured efficacy, the feeling that one's vote is potentially decisive. With the collection of cross-national election studies under the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), it is now possible to examine how attitudes are shaped by electoral rules and how these attitudes influence turnout. We first review the evidence regarding the relationship between electoral systems, political efficacy, strength of partisan attachments and turnout. Based on this past research, we test a model of efficacy and electoral participation that combines electoral system and individual level effects.