Parties, Legislators, and the Origins of Proportional Representation

Abstract

A prominent line of theories holds that proportional representation (PR) was introduced in many European democracies by a fragmented bloc of conservative parties seeking to preserve their legislative seat shares after franchise extension and industrialization increased the vote base of socialist parties. In contrast to this "seatmaximization" account, we focus on how PR affected party leaders' control over nominations, thereby enabling them to discipline their followers and build more cohesive parties. We explore this "party-building" account in the case of Norway, using roll call data from six reform proposals in 1919. We show that leaders were more likely to vote in favor of PR than rank-and-file members, even controlling for the parties' expected seat payoffs and the district-level socialist electoral threat facing individual legislators. Moreover, using within-legislator variation, we show that the internal cohesion of parties increased significantly after the introduction of PR.

When dominant parties adopt proportional representation: the mysterious case of Belgium

“…Hence, unlike recent contributions that stress the differing interests of party leadership and backbenchers (Cox et al, 2019;Schröder and Manow, 2019), we argue that the main line of disagreement may also stem from the programmatic interests of different factions within a party. The Catholics' conservative and progressive wings were both interested in preserving the party's majority position.…”

“…Second, in line with recent contributions (e.g. Cox et al, 2019;Schröder and Manow, 2019), we emphasize intra-party divisions over electoral reform. More precisely, we argue that differences in exposure to electoral competition influences the reforms considered and the degree of intra-party conflict over reforms.…”

“…The literature on European political history shows that electoral alliances between socialist and nonsocialist parties as well as joint campaigns for PR were in fact quite common at the beginning of the 20th century. Even though some authors have started to recognize the importance of intra-party conflicts (Cox et al, 2019;Schröder and Manow, 2019) or coalitions between socialist and nonsocialist parties (Rodden, 2009;Emmenegger and Walter, 2019), they have not yet been systematically incorporated in explanations of electoral system choice. Similarly, research has only begun to explore variation in the effective degree of proportionality of PR systems (Bol et al, 2015;Walter and Emmenegger, 2019) and its political consequences (Carey and Hix, 2011;Kedar et al, 2016).…”

Measuring the Competitiveness of Elections

“…The Swiss case has previously been featured by Grofman and Selb (2009), and is useful due to within-country variation in district magnitude, including SMDs as well as MMDs. The Norwegian case we introduce to the body of empirical evidence offers an additionally useful context of within-country variation, as an electoral reform in 1919 shifted all elections from SMD to MMD contests with varying magnitude (see Cox, Fiva and Smith, 2019). We argue that the determination of whether elections in MMD systems are more or less competitive than SMD systems stems primarily from the different units in which distances are expressed by different measures.…”

Electoral Reform and Parliamentary Debates

“…In the former system, voters can choose their most preferred candidates, while in the latter, voters are only provided a meaningful choice between parties. In candidate‐centered systems, legislators vote less in line with the party (Carey ; Cox, Fiva, and Smith ; Depauw and Martin ), focus more on their constituencies (Høyland, Hobolt, and Hix ; McLay and Vowles ), and run more personal campaigns (Catalinac ). Such behavior is mainly attributed to individual candidates’ incentive to influence their electoral prospects independently of the party leadership.…”