Malapportionment and democracy: A curvilinear relationship

Ong, Kian Ming; Kasuya, Yuko; Mori, Kota

doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2017.06.004

Cited by 19 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…Despite the fact that varying combinations of electioneering strategies have been of interest, we know little about how malapportionment is related to blatant electoral manipulation. Previous research on the value of a vote has primarily focused on the economic consequences of malapportionment (Horiuchi and Saito, 2003) or determinants of malapportionment (Samuels and Snyder, 2001; Horiuchi, 2004; Kamahara and Kasuya, 2014; Ong et al ., 2017). One important exception is Daxecker (2019), who uses the constituency-level data of six parliamentary elections in India and finds that highly malapportioned districts tend to experience less electoral violence.…”

Section: The Incumbent's Election Toolkitmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The main independent variable in this paper is the degree of malapportionment. I use an extensive cross-sectional time series dataset of malapportionment originally constructed by Kamahara and Kasuya (2014), complemented with Ong et al's (2017) cross-sectional data of malapportionment 5 . Malapportionment is defined as ‘the discrepancy between the shares of legislative seats and the shares of population held by geographical units’ (Samuels and Snyder, 2001: 652).…”

Section: Empiricsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Numerous studies have demonstrated that malapportionment significantly helps ruling parties boost their parliamentary seats in both democracies and autocracies. According to Ong et al (2017), although some levels of malapportionment exist across virtually all types of political regimes, competitive autocracy and new democracies are most likely to be malapportioned for ruling parties. Using constituency-level data from eight sub-Saharan African countries, Boone and Wahman (2015) offer empirical evidence demonstrating that high levels of malapportionment lead to overrepresentation of ruling parties.…”

Section: The Incumbent's Election Toolkitmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In sub-Saharan Africa, unequal values of a vote between rural and urban areas helped incumbents to win elections (Boone and Wahman, 2015: 341–344). Even in advanced democracies such as Japan, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's (LDP) main support base had been overrepresented until the early 1990s, which helped the party to stay in power for long (Ong et al ., 2017: 119).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Gerrymandering, namely redistricting in favor of ruling parties, may be also employed as a further form of institutional manipulation (Wong, 2019). Similarly, malapportionment, ‘the discrepancy between the shares of legislative seats and the shares of population held by geographical units’ (Samuels and Snyder, 2001: 652), helps incumbents win elections by increasing the value of a vote primarily within the ruling party's strongholds (Ong et al ., 2017). For instance, Malaysia's United Malay National Organization increased the overrepresentation of rural districts where the party's major support base resides, which contributed to its election victory (Washida, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Blatant electoral fraud and the value of a vote

Higashijima

2021

Japanese Journal of Political Science

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This paper explores the relationship between malapportionment and blatant electoral fraud. Although blatant electoral fraud enables incumbents to win elections, it may undermine legitimacy and provoke protests. Malapportionment also helps the incumbent succeed by assigning larger portions of seats to party strongholds, yet its key features differ from electoral fraud. Because malapportionment neither involves coercion nor overt fraud, it is less likely to be followed by reactionary protests. But, it is an inflexible electioneering strategy, because reapportionment leads to difficult coordination problems among ruling legislators. Cross-national statistical analyses of 98 countries (1993–2012) show that, although malapportionment does not affect whether leaders use election violence and electoral cheating, political leaders become less dependent upon the simultaneous use of these fraudulent strategies when high levels of malapportionment are already endowed. The results suggest that although governments might continue to use specific types of blatant electoral fraud even when the levels of malapportionment are high, malapportionment allows governments to be more selective with combining different methods of blatant electoral fraud.

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