In elections under proportional representation (PR), proportionality between votes and seats is an ideal never achieved in reality. Discrepancies between votes and seats are most prevalent under the most widely used PR seat allocation formula, D’Hondt/Jefferson. This article provides the first comprehensive model to explain the discrepancies between the national seat allocation and the vote distribution under the D’Hondt rule. The model identifies six systematic factors that drive these deviations, ranging from the bias in the seat allocation rule to differences in the electoral rules (e.g. malapportionment) and party competition across districts. Thus, this model goes beyond the well-known rule that large parties are overrepresented under D’Hondt by providing a quantitative point estimate of this deviation and of between-district inequalities. The model identifies the (expected) beneficiaries and losers of the seat allocation and predicts the magnitude of these penalties and benefits. At the level of political parties, the model predicts the gains and losses in terms of seats, relative to the parties’ proportional share of seats. Empirical tests on 156 elections from 23 democracies, covering 3,653 political parties and 2,139 constituencies, are used to assess its validity and to calculate the resulting substantial effects.

In the literature on secession, there is broad agreement on the important role of ethno-nationalist mobilization. However, during the breakup of the formerly communist federations in 1989-1992, ethno-nationalist mobilization only partly explains the secessionist claims that occurred.This study highlights a second, non-nationalist type of secessionist claim in the context of transitions from authoritarian rule. It builds on the classical model of transitions, and extends it to federal-authoritarian states. According to this argument, sub-state government initiatives for regime change can turn into a federal conflict, and result in secessionist claims with no ethno-nationalist motives.Empirically, this article provides a congruence analysis, scrutinizing the timing of the declarations of sovereignty and independence of the 23 constituent republics of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, based on a secondary analysis of the literature. While the first republic-level governments to declare independence were dominated by ethno-nationalists, regime conflict played an important role in a second, possibly decisive stage of the dissolution of the three communist federations.

The openness of the political system for the representation of social or economic groups through their parties is mired in complexities. Extant scholarship has identified multiple electoral system hurdles that jointly determine the institutional opportunities for group representation: This article offers a simple metric to the institutional parts of the political opportunity structure for the electoral representation of social groups. A single variable summarizes the institutional opportunities for group representation, as determined jointly by electoral rules, the demographic structure of ethnic minority groups and their electoral geography. This new Index of Electability considers recent innovations in electoral rules, such as mixed electoral systems, legal thresholds or quotas, which occur in most contemporary democracies. Empirically, the index is applied to ethnic minority parties in 57 plural democracies worldwide. It shows that our index highlights the necessary conditions for parliamentary representation of minorities through their own parties. Contrary to widespread belief that many minority groups form ethnic parties, only one out of three ethnic minority groups worldwide which could, in principle, do so, actually form such a party.

Territorial and ethno-territorial institutions are used as tools of institutional engineering in divided societies. However, they also face major risks, as they might deepen and perpetuate societal divisions, deprive group members living dispersed from group representation, and prepare the grounds for new conflicts. Our comment embeds the four proposals put forward by Ivan Pepic in the debate, with a comparative perspective.

Democracies across the world have experienced the rise of new political parties. The dominant view of the model of (retrospective) economic voting implicitly assumes that the main beneficiary of electoral change is the established opposition. However, the rise of new political parties affects how we think of retrospective (economic) voting. This article presents a more nuanced picture of electoral change and considers when electoral turnover benefits established opposition parties, and when new political parties. The theoretical model introduces different macro-economic and macro-political motives for electoral turnover. Using a novel dataset on electoral change, covering 59 democracies worldwide, it is found that high levels of corruption discredit the entire political establishment, and promote the rise of new parties. The effect of economic hardship is more nuanced. Low economic growth mainly benefits the established opposition because voters look for an established alternative within the political system. Rising unemployment, by contrast, promotes the rise of new parties.

This article evaluates how territorial autonomy affects ethnic mobilization and conflict during regime transitions. Previous research has highlighted its conflict-inducing role during prominent transition contexts. Alternatively, it has shown its pacifying role in the “average” case, without distinguishing transition periods from stable contexts. Addressing these gaps, we argue that the de-escalatory consequences of autonomy depend on critical stabilizing factors which are themselves “muted” during transitions. We test our expectations in a cross-national analysis, covering all regime transitions between 1946 and 2017. We also revisit the 1989 transition from Communism, focusing on the role of “inherited” autonomy in the post-communist successor states. This enables us to address concerns whereby autonomy is offered to ward off transitions or whereby transitions are themselves induced by mobilization. Our findings indicate that during transitions, territorial autonomy increases the likelihood of ethnic mobilization, government concessions in response, and violent escalation where these are not forthcoming.

The literature on consociational democracies has introduced an important distinction between corporate and liberal types of consociations. However, once we apply a deeper conceptualization of this corporate-liberal divide, we find that many empirical cases are mixing elements of the two. Most consociational democracies of the corporate type rely on ethnic quotas or reserved seats for national elections, but combine them with liberal voting rights, i.e. a ballot that is universal for all voters, without segmenting voters into different identity groups. This has consequences for the democratic principle of "one-person-one-vote," leading to a novel type of deviation. This article discusses different consociational democracies in light of the one-person-one-vote principle, and identifies new "paradoxes" of representation related to (corporate) quota rules that are combined with (liberal) universal voting rights.

ABSTRACT After the 2021 parliamentary elections, the Kosovo Supreme Court annulled some 5800 votes expressed for three minority lists running for guaranteed seats of the Bosniak and the Roma minorities. The court considered it impossible that they were cast by members of the respective ethnic communities. This court ruling has wider implications for consociational theory, as it makes novel normative prescriptions about group representation in divided societies. The debate in Kosovo closely mirrors similar controversies elsewhere, such as the ‘Sejdić-Finci’ case in the elections of the state presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, or the reserved parliamentary seats in Lebanon.

The proportionality principle of electoral systems plays an important role in multiple literatures, including comparative politics, political economy, and conflict studies. The single most important electoral system feature used to determine whether an electoral system might provide for proportional outcomes is district magnitude, i.e., the number of representatives that are elected from a given district. However, once we move beyond “simple” systems, measuring the institutional side of the equation becomes more complex. The legislative electoral systems of three out of five (61%) contemporary democracies rely on multiple institutional rules that affect the proportionality of their seat allocation, for example by combining different district magnitudes in multiple tiers, or delimiting the number of parties that can win seats through legal thresholds. There is no widely accepted measure of district magnitude for such cases. Relying on four simple axioms, this article extends the concept of district magnitude to all these complex electoral systems. We introduce the effective district magnitude, a new index that measures the proportionality of electoral systems based solely on institutional rules. It is applicable for all rules used in national parliamentary elections in democracies worldwide. This new, theory-based index improves the explanatory power of two crucial variables usually associated with district magnitude: vote-seat disproportionality and party system fragmentation.

Mixed-member proportional electoral systems (MMP) are widely praised because they combine the direct, personal election of MPs from single-seat constituencies with a proportional seat allocation. However, the size of the proportional tier matters for the question of whether the system's overall proportionality is preserved. Hence, a key challenge for constitution-makers and scholars is finding the right balance between district and proportional seats, so as to maximise district representation and guarantee proportional representation.This paper develops the first theoretical model that helps to locate this sweet spot for district and party seats. The novel solution builds on Taagepera's “logical models” about party sizes. The model is tested on 58 national parliamentary elections under MMP rules.

AbstractSwiss citizens take pride in their export industry. Although chocolate figures among those products that the global public most frequently associates with its export industry, Switzerland also stands out thanks to the unique features of its model of democracy. Swiss citizens take pride in their democracy. This is mirrored by scholarly claims that Swiss democracy could offer ‘possible solutions to conflict in multicultural societies’. This chapter asks how four main pillars of Swiss democracy—direct democracy, the consensus-oriented institutions, the consociational democracy model, and federalism—are received abroad, and how they are reflected in the literature on comparative politics. Additionally, it analyses whether and how Swiss democracy promotion abroad builds on these supposed strengths of Swiss democracy. It turns out that the consociational democracy of Switzerland, which is the most relevant aspect to the Swiss democracy promotion and peacebuilding agenda, dates back to the nineteenth and twentieth century, and the cultural divide that was the basis on which the Swiss consociational model was built is no longer relevant. The Swiss promotion of democracy relies primarily on Switzerland’s past. This does no harm for its exports: political history has no expiration date.

Jahrbuch für direkte Demokratie 2021 , Seite 13 - 33

Lijphart’s claim that power-sharing spurs democratization in divided societies has strongly influenced ‘institutional engineering’ and is widely accepted among scholars despite the fact that empirical tests of its merits remain rare. This article revisits the democratic effect of power-sharing, arguing that it has two antagonist faces. On the positive side, it provides guarantees of inclusion to political elites, allowing them to commit to democratic rules. On the negative side, it also has an illiberal face, entailing limits on competition and individual rights. In this article, these contrary characteristics are traced back to two institutional types of power-sharing: a more flexible and open, liberal, type and a more rigid, corporate one. Using a novel dataset on power-sharing rules for 138 multi-ethnic countries and the period from 1945 to 2016, their respective democratic merits are tested. Conforming to theoretical expectations, the findings indicate that only liberal forms of power-sharing exhibit strong positive effects on democracy while corporate forms exert mixed or even negative ones. These findings are robust to a series of alternate model specifications and operationalizations as well as to instrumental variable approaches. In conclusion, the article indicates only a partial democratic effect of power-sharing, limited to its liberal subtype.

Measures of the proportionality of distributions are used across disciplines. ‘Disproportionality indices’ represent an application in politics, comparing the seat allocation in parliaments to the votes expressed for political parties. Disproportionality in elections is particularly high when many votes are expressed for parties not entering parliament; in some elections such ‘wasted votes’ add up to two-digit vote percentages. However, ‘wasted votes’ for small parties below the electoral threshold, as well as votes for non-partisan candidates, are often not listed in detail in election statistics, and are instead lumped together in residual categories such as ‘Others’ or ‘Independents’. This can hide major discrepancies between vote and seat distributions. This risks introducing systematic bias into the analysis of elections. This paper discusses several theoretically based methods to estimate indices of disproportionality for incomplete data, based on different theoretical scenarios concerning the distribution of votes and seats, and inspired by Taagepera’s method of ‘logical boundaries’. Empirical tests, relying on a dataset of 735 parliamentary elections worldwide, show that residual categories substantially affect indices of disproportionality. Several methods can considerably improve the measurement validity compared to the frequently used ‘naive’ procedures.

Mounting evidence indicates that power-sharing supports transitions to democracy. However, the resulting quality of democracy remains understudied. Given the increasing global spread of power-sharing, this is a crucial oversight, as prominent critiques accuse it of a number of critical deficiencies. The present article advances this literature in two ways. First, it offers a comprehensive discussion of how power-sharing affects the quality of democracy, going beyond specific individual aspects of democracy. It argues that power-sharing advances some of these aspects while having drawbacks for others. Second, it offers the first systematic, large- N analysis of the frequently discussed consequences of power-sharing for the quality of democracy. It relies on a dataset measuring the quality of democracy in 70 countries worldwide, combining it with new fine-grained data for institutional power-sharing. The results indicate that power-sharing is a complex institutional model which privileges a particular set of democratic actors and processes, while deemphasizing others.

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In recent decades, there has been a noticeable increase in the use of quantitative techniques in the study of ethnicity and nationalism, without, however, a sufficient amount of reflection on how these techniques have contributed to our understanding of ethnic and national identities. As such, in this exchange three sets of authors answer questions about the degree to which it is possible to use quantitative data to measure ethnic and national identities, which types of methods are most suitable in measuring these identities and what the major research findings of this quantitative research are that were not possible using qualitative approaches.

ABSTRACT International intervention is widely considered to stabilize peace in post-war societies. Its effects on democracy are more contested. External intervention risks reinforcing, rather than resolving deadlocks in domestic politics. This negative effect is not inevitable. This article proposes a new, theoretical model of political peacebuilding, based on a spatial model of politics in post-war democracies. In the classical model, the peacebuilding mission has an own political agenda, which relieves the domestic political actors of their political responsibility and deepens the domestic deadlock. In the arbiter model proposed in this article, the peacebuilding mission uses its powers to push for compromises between the domestic actors. This enables democratic decision-making within the domestic institutions. Empirically, the paper studies the impact of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) in Bosnia–Herzegovina with its power to issue binding decrees. The paper analyses the role of former High Representatives, using the authors’ original interviews with the office-holders and over 2700 press releases. As the results show, periods when the OHR acted as an arbiter were rewarded with a higher degree of cooperation between domestic elites. These findings corroborate the usefulness of the arbiter model as a new strategy of international intervention in post-conflict societies.

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