Under open list proportional representation, voters vote both for a party and for some candidates within its list (preferential vote). Seats are assigned to parties in proportion to their votes and, within parties, to the candidates obtaining the largest number of preferential votes. The paper examines how the number of candidates voters can vote for affects the representation of minorities in parliaments. I highlight a clear negative relationship between the two. Minorities are proportionally represented in parliament only if voters can cast a limited number of preferential votes. When the number of preferential votes increases, a multiplier effect arises, which disproportionately increases the power of the majority in determining the elected candidates.
Austen-Smith (2000) reports a theoretical result that if the cost of entering the workforce is sufficiently low, winner-take-all political systems induce endogenous redistribution levels that are systematically lower than those determined by proportional representation systems (Proposition 6). The proof in Austen-Smith (2000) has a mistake. We explain the mistake and offer an alternative proof. The conclusion of the original paper continues to hold.
Do electoral incentives affect immigration policies? Exploiting the Italian system for refugees’ reception and data from Italian municipalities, we show that proximity to elections reduces the probability that a municipality applies to host a refugee center by 26%, despite the economic benefits arising from these centers. Low electoral competition and high shares of extreme-right voters drive the effect. Our results are rationalized by a theoretical model and can explain the unequal distribution of refugees across and within countries.
A measure of association is row-size invariant if it is una¤ected by the mutliplication of all entries in a row of a cross-classi…cation table by a same positive number. It is class-size invariant if it is una¤ected by the mutliplication of all entries in a class (i.e., a row or a column). We prove that every class-size invariant measure of association assigns to each m n cross-classi…cation table a number which depends only on the cross-product ratios of its 2 2 subtables. We propose a monotonicity axiom requiring that the degree of association should increase after shifting mass from cells of a table where this mass is below its expected value to cells where it is above -provided that total mass in each class remains constant. We prove that no continuous row-size invariant measure of association is monotonic if m 4.
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