Electoral Engineering: Voting Rules and Political BehaviorFrom Kosovo to Kabul, the last decade witnessed growing interest in ?electoral engineering?. Reformers have sought to achieve either greater government accountability through majoritarian arrangements or wider parliamentary diversity through proportional formula. Underlying the normative debates are important claims about the impact and consequences of electoral reform for political representation and voting behavior. The study compares and evaluates two broad schools of thought, each offering contracting expectations. One popular approach claims that formal rules define electoral incentives facing parties, politicians and citizens. By changing these rules, rational choice institutionalism claims that we have the capacity to shape political behavior. Alternative cultural modernization theories differ in their emphasis on the primary motors driving human behavior, their expectations about the pace of change, and also their assumptions about the ability of formal institutional rules to alter, rather than adapt to, deeply embedded and habitual social norms and patterns of human behavior. |
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American Political Science analysis André Blais Andrew Reynolds Arend Lijphart Available online ballot structure Ben Reilly Bernard Grofman Britain British Cambridge University Press campaign candidate-ballots candidates Chapter citizens cleavage politics compulsory voting constituency service contests cross-national cultural modernization Democratic district magnitude Dual-ballot Duverger's Law elec electoral engineering electoral formula Electoral Laws electoral reform electoral rules Electoral Studies FPTP gender quotas impact incentives institutions International IDEA Israel Journal of Political left-right legislative levels lower house majoritarian electoral systems majoritarian systems majority minor parties models Oxford University Press parliament participation party competition party identification Party List PR Party Politics party systems party-ballots patterns Pippa Norris plurality Political Parties Political Science Political Science Review political system politicians Preference-ballot proportional representation rational-choice institutionalism Romania Ronald Inglehart seats single-member districts strategies Taiwan theories tion type of electoral Ukraine voter turnout voting behavior voting choice women worldwide York Zealand