Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World's Electoral SystemsPopular elections are at the heart of representative democracy. Thus, understanding the laws and practices that govern such elections is essential to understanding modern democracy. In this book, Professor Cox views electoral laws as posing a variety of coordination problems that political actors must solve. Under plurality rule, for example, not every leftist aspirant for the presidency can run at once, if the Left is to have a good chance of winning. But although all leftists will benefit from unifying behind a single candidate, they may not agree on which candidate that should be. Analogous coordination problems - and with them the necessity of negotiating withdrawals, strategic voting, and other species of strategic coordination - arise in all electoral systems. Although the classics of electoral studies have dealt with issues of coordination, this is the first book that employs a unified game-theoretic model to study strategic coordination worldwide and that relies primarily on constituency-level rather than national aggregate data in testing theoretical propositions about the effects of electoral laws. This is also the first book that considers not just what happens when political forces succeed in solving the coordination problems inherent in the electoral system they face but also what happens when they fail. |
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Contents
Introduction | 3 |
Duvergers propositions | 13 |
STRATEGIC VOTING | 35 |
On electoral systems | 37 |
Strategic voting in singlemember singleballot systems | 69 |
Strategic voting in multimember districts | 99 |
Strategic voting in singlemember dualballot systems | 123 |
Some concluding comments on strategic voting | 139 |
COORDINATION FAILURES AND DEMOCRATIC PERFORMANCE | 223 |
Coordination failures and representation | 225 |
Coordination failures and dominant parties | 238 |
Coordination failures and realignments | 251 |
CONCLUSION | 267 |
Conclusion | 269 |
Formulaic structures in 77 democracies circa 1992 | 279 |
Notation and proofs for Chapter 6 | 303 |
STRATEGIC ENTRY | 149 |
Strategic voting party labels and entry | 151 |
Rational entry and the conservation of disproportionality evidence from Japan | 173 |
ELECTORAL COORDINATION AT THE SYSTEM LEVEL | 179 |
Putting the constituencies together | 181 |
Electoral institutions cleavage structures and the number of parties | 203 |
Data and sources for Chapter 11 | 308 |
| 312 | |
| 329 | |
| 339 | |
Other editions - View all
Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World's Electoral Systems Gary W. Cox No preview available - 1997 |
Common terms and phrases
argument bipartism cartels cast chapter coalition Colombia Conservatives constituency coordination failure coordination game d'Hondt method democratic didates district level district magnitude Duverger Duverger's Law Duvergerian effective number elec electoral structure electoral system elites endorsement ENPV entry equilibrium example exclusive expectations first-round fused vote Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem Hagenbach-Bischoff quotas Hare quota incentives instrumentally rational interaction joint lists labels leftist legislative elections Liberal list order list votes list's Lloyd George LRPR majority runoff national level number of candidates number of competitors number of parties number of seats number of viable outcome partisan cartels party system party's plurality rule political polls PR-d'Hondt preferences presidential election quota rational expectations realignment round Sartori seat allocation Seats awarded Secondary district SF ratio Shugart simple plurality single-member districts SMSP SNTV strategic desertion strategic voting Taagepera tion upper bound variables viable candidates vote shares vote strategically vote totals voters wasted vote
Bibliographic information
| Title | Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World's Electoral Systems Political Economy of Instituti Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions |
| Author | Gary W. Cox |
| Edition | illustrated, reprint |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press, 1997 |
| ISBN | 0521585279, 9780521585279 |
| Length | 340 pages |
| Subjects | › › Political Science / General Political Science / Political Process / Campaigns & Elections Political Science / Public Policy / Economic Policy |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |