Electoral Engineering: Voting Rules and Political Behavior

by Pippa Norris

Overview

This book compares the consequences of electoral rules and cultural modernization for many dimensions of political representations and voting behavior. It includes patterns of party competition, the strength of social cleavages and party loyalties, levels of turnout, the gender and ethnic diversity of parliaments, and the provisions of constituency service. The study covers elections held from 1996 to 2002 in newer as well as established democracies that range from the U.S., Australia, and Switzerland to Peru, Taiwan and Ukraine.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521829779
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/09/2004
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politic
Pages:	392
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.98(d)

Table of Contents

Part I. Introduction: 1. Do rules matter?; 2. Classifying electoral systems; 3. Evaluating electoral systems; Part II. The Consequences for Voting Behavior: 4. Party systems; 5. Social cleavages; 6. Party loyalties; 7. Turnout; Part III. The Consequences for Political Representation: 8. Women; 9. Ethnic minorities; 10. Constituency service; Part IV. Conclusions: 11. The impact of electoral engineering.

Editorial Reviews

"Ultimately, by combining models based on incentive theory and cultural modernization, Norris provides an innovative and important empirical contribution to the rational-choice institutionalism literature. This book would serve well scholars seeking a broad and comprehensive overview of the debate between structure and culture as explanations of political behavior, as well as those seeking a more rigorous theoretical and empirical approach to incentive-based models of political behavior on a comparative basis." Perspectives on Political Science

"Like earlier books by this prolific author, this book is a masterpiece of synthesis, original theorizing, and empirical analysis of an impressively large number and variety of cases. Pippa Norris has a great ability to deal with big subjects in a very creative way." Arend Lijphart, University of California, San Diego

"This book looks at public opinion data linking attitudes, party choices, and electoral systems in ways that the game theory literature usually fails to come to grips with. It is a major contribution to the electoral systems literature and to the comparative politics literature in general." Bernard Grofman, University of California, Irvine

"In this highly innovative book, Pippa Norris combines institutional and survey data from 32 widely different countries to assess the possibilities and limitations of implanting democracy through institutional engineering. As the international community increasingly tries to remake political systems from Albania to Zimbabwe, this study will be an important touchstone for policy-makers and analysts alike." Richard S. Katz, The Johns Hopkins University

"Norris is one of only a small handful of political scientists who could meet the ambitions of a study such as this, and she has done it with her usual aplomb!" David Farrell, University of Manchester

From the Publisher