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Fernandes Jorge, Yakter Alon, Shomer
Yael and Put Gert-Jan. “The Electoral Implications of Legislative Candidate
Selection Democratization”, British Journal of Political Science,
Forthcoming [IF 5.7; 16/322, Q1 top 5%]
This study investigates whether political parties benefit
electorally from democratizing their candidate selection processes—such as
introducing primaries or giving more influence to party members and voters.
While inclusive selection procedures are often promoted as tools for enhancing
legitimacy, transparency, and responsiveness, the paper argues that they do not
meaningfully improve a party’s electoral performance. Drawing on a large-scale
comparative analysis of 34 democracies from 1970 to 2019 and a preregistered
conjoint experiment in France, Israel, and Sweden, the findings reveal a
consistent pattern: although voters say they prefer more democratic candidate
selection methods, they deprioritize them at the ballot box in favor of factors
like ideological proximity and female representation.
By combining observational and experimental approaches, the paper
contributes to broader debates on party reform and democratic responsiveness.
It demonstrates that institutional changes meant to signal openness and
accountability may not translate into voter support unless they align with
higher-salience electoral considerations. As such, party elites should not
expect electoral rewards solely from procedural reforms, and scholars should
continue to explore the multidimensional trade-offs voters make in complex
political environments.
This paper introduces and contextualizes the democratic crisis in
Israel through a scholarly lens. It introduces the broader research topic
collection that critically examines Israel’s democratic crisis from various
perspectives: institutional, legislative, judicial, and social. The paper seeks
to summarize the collection of articles that were devoted to the question: were
the judicial overhaul proposed in early 2023 by Israel’s newly elected
right-wing government under Benjamin Netanyahu a mere institutional reform
aiming at re-establishing the balance across the branches or was it a far-reaching constitutional and regime coup?.
The article outlines the convergence of multiple developments over
the past decade—including recurring elections, rising populism, growing
polarization, alleged corruption, and institutional weakening to argue that the
structural reform of the judiciary quickly emerged as a symbol of a more
profound crisis of democratic governance, raising alarm among scholars, legal
experts, and the broader public. Ultimately, the article emphasizes the need
for continued academic engagement in analyzing the rapid transformations in
Israeli democracy, both as a national case and as a lens for understanding
global patterns of democratic backsliding.
This study examines whether
and how the gender of a national leader influenced countries’ performance in
managing the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on data from 56 democracies over four
waves of the pandemic, the research demonstrates that countries led by women
consistently outperformed those led by men in terms of lower infection rates,
mortality, and excess deaths—particularly in the first three waves. By
combining a novel wave-alignment methodology with rigorous robustness checks,
the authors isolate the effect of leader gender from confounding factors such
as state capacity, healthcare system strength, or cultural context. The
gendered performance gap narrowed in the fourth wave, where vaccination rates
played a more dominant role, but female-led countries still maintained a
relative advantage.
The article also probes the
mechanisms driving this gap, offering empirical support for the roles of public
trust and government effectiveness. Citizens in female-led countries
consistently reported greater satisfaction with pandemic policies, and these governments
demonstrated more effective deployment of healthcare resources. The authors
reject alternative explanations offered in prior studies, demonstrating that
leader gender remains a significant predictor even after controlling for
confounding factors. The findings contribute to the literature on gender and
political leadership, emphasizing that the impact of descriptive representation
extends beyond symbolic value and has real implications for policy
outcomes—particularly in times of national crisis.
This book chapter challenges
the conventional way in which political scientists define the end of
parliamentary governments. It critiques the dominant practice of classifying
any intra-coalition party change as a government termination, arguing that this
approach inflates the number of government changes and skews comparative
analyses across countries. To address this, the authors introduce a more
precise definition that considers a government terminated only under three
conditions: the installation of a new prime minister, the occurrence of a
general election, or a partisan realignment that results in the loss of a
governing majority. Using data from 28 OECD democracies, they show that this
refined approach reveals that existing metrics often exaggerate government
instability, leading to misinterpretations of institutional effectiveness.
Fernandes
Jorge, Yael Shomer and Matthew Shugart. 2024. “Electoral Systems and the
Personal Vote”, in Adrian Vatter and Rahel Freiburghaus (Eds.) The Handbook
of Comparative Political Institutions, Edward Elgar Publishing.
This review article revisits
and synthesizes nearly three decades of research sparked by Carey and Shugart’s
(1995) seminal work on the personal vote—defined as the portion of a
candidate’s electoral support rooted in personal traits, actions, and reputation
rather than party affiliation. The authors examine how electoral systems
incentivize personal vote-seeking and present a comprehensive overview of how
the concept has been theorized, measured, and empirically studied across
different contexts. They introduce a two-dimensional framework based on
delegation theory and legislators’ goals to organize the literature, clarifying
distinctions between systems that prioritize party-centered versus
candidate-centered representation.
The article critically
assesses the methodological tools used to measure personal vote incentives and
identifies several limitations in the existing literature, such as inconsistent
metrics and underdeveloped connections to broader theories of democratic
representation. It also highlights how personal vote-seeking behavior
intersects with pressing normative questions, including responsiveness to
constituents and the inclusion of historically marginalized groups. The authors
conclude by outlining a forward-looking research agenda, calling for more
rigorous conceptualization, cross-national data, and exploration of how
personal vote incentives influence legislative behavior and democratic
legitimacy in evolving electoral environments.
Yael
Shomer and Gert-Jan, Put. 2023 “Are citizens more politically engaged
when candidate selection is democratic? Analysis of seven parliamentary
election cycles in Israel (1996-2015)”, Political Research Quarterly,
76(3), pp.1119-1133 [IF 3.254; 67/187, Q2].
This study examines whether
democratic candidate selection processes—such as primaries and other inclusive
nomination methods—encourage higher levels of political engagement among
citizens. Drawing on public opinion data from seven Israeli election cycles
(1996–2015) and original data on party candidate selection processes, the
authors assess how intra-party democratization shapes both electoral and
partisan participation, as well as broader forms of political engagement like
following campaign news and discussing politics. Contrary to widespread
assumptions, the findings reveal that while democratic selection processes are
associated with increased political engagement, they do not significantly
affect actual voter turnout or participation in party activities.
The study suggests that
democratizing internal party procedures may enhance citizens’ attentiveness to
politics and foster greater political interest, but these reforms alone do not
necessarily translate into concrete political behavior. This structural disconnect
between engagement and participation highlights the limits of procedural
reforms in generating deeper civic involvement. The research contributes to the
literature on intra-party democracy by emphasizing the importance of
distinguishing between different forms of political involvement and by
grounding the analysis in longitudinal data from a dynamic multiparty
parliamentary system.
Yael
Shomer, Bjørn Erik Rasch and Osnat Akirav. 2022. “Termination of
parliamentary governments: revised definitions and implications”, West
European Politics, 45(3), pp. 550-575. [IF 4.055; 30/187 Q1, 13
citations].
This article reconsiders how
political scientists define the termination of parliamentary governments,
challenging the widespread approach that treats any intra-coalition partisan
change as a government termination. The authors argue that this standard definition
artificially inflates the number of governments, distorting cross-national
comparisons and theoretical conclusions about government duration and
stability. They propose a revised conceptualization that counts only three
types of events as government terminations: the appointment of a new prime
minister, a general election, or a partisan shift that causes the loss of
majority status. Applying this refined framework to data from 28 OECD
democracies, they demonstrate that traditional metrics overestimate government
instability in certain countries, leading to biased assessments of
institutional performance.
The article makes both
theoretical and empirical contributions. It shows that adopting the revised
definition alters key conclusions about government duration. By advocating for
a more consistent and substantively meaningful classification of government
change, the authors provide scholars with a stronger foundation for comparative
research on coalition politics, executive-legislative relations, and democratic
stability. Their findings urge a reconsideration of standard datasets and
encourage the adoption of measurement practices that better reflect the
political realities of parliamentary systems.
Shomer, Yael. 2020.
“Women’s Representation in Israel: Between Selection Processes and Protective
Mechanisms”. In Gender Gaps in Israeli Politics, ed. Michal Shamir,
Hanna Herzog and Naomi Chazan, Van Leer Institute Press.
Scholars disagree about the way candidate
selection processes affect women’s representation. While some argue that
primaries benefit women candidates, other claim the opposite. I test the effect
of selection procedures on female representation and find primaries to benefit
it. I caution, however, against concluding that democratic selections are
beneficial. I argue that party leaders are aware of primaries’ negative effects
and they offset them by adopting partisan protective mechanisms. Therefore,
controlling for partisan protective mechanisms will unveil the negative effect
of primaries on female representation. Using party level data from eight
legislative terms of the Israeli Knesset I find support for my hypotheses.
Shomer
Yael Gert-Jan Put, and Einat Gedalya-Lavy. 2018. Does intraparty
democracy affect levels of trust in parties? The cases of Belgium and Israel, Acta
Politca 53, pp. 167-183 [IF: 1.269; 55/161, Q2, 18 citations].
This article examines
whether and how intra-party democracy—specifically, the mechanisms used for
candidate selection—influences public trust in political parties. Focusing on
Belgium and Israel, two multiparty parliamentary systems where intra-party democratization
has been prominently debated, the study combines comparative public opinion
data and party-level selection mechanisms. The authors find that inclusive
candidate selection processes, which expand participation to broader
selectorates, tend to increase trust in parties. In contrast, decentralized
selection processes, which transfer authority to sub-national levels or
local branches, are associated with lower levels of party trust.
By disentangling different
dimensions of candidate selection (inclusiveness and centralization), the paper
contributes to the literature on political trust and party organization. It
underscores the importance of how parties structure their internal
decision-making processes and suggests that reforms aimed at enhancing
intra-party democracy can improve public perceptions, but only under specific
organizational conditions. This research has implications for both party
strategy and broader democratic legitimacy in representative systems.
Shomer,
Yael. 2017. "Institutional reforms and their effect on
legislators’ behavior: The Israeli experience, 1992–2011", Party
Politics 23(3), pp. 297-308 [IF 2.286; 19/161, Q1, 5 citations].
This study investigates how
electoral and institutional reforms shape the behavior of legislators in
parliamentary systems, using Israel as a case study. Focusing on a series of
key institutional changes—including the adoption and later repeal of the direct
election law for the prime minister—the paper examines how these reforms
influenced legislative activism, party loyalty, and coalition dynamics. Drawing
on an original dataset covering all Israeli legislators from 1992 to 2011, the
study reveals that reforms intended to strengthen executive authority and
voter-party linkages had unintended consequences, including increased
legislative fragmentation and reduced party discipline.
By analyzing variation in
parliamentary behavior over nearly two decades of reform, the article
contributes to the broader literature on institutional design and political behavior
and accountability. It demonstrates that changes in electoral rules can
recalibrate the incentives facing individual legislators, shifting their
strategic behavior in ways that may undermine rather than enhance
governability. The Israeli case highlights the complexity of institutional
engineering in multiparty democracies and underscores the need for careful
empirical evaluation of reform outcomes before drawing normative conclusions
about their effectiveness.
Shomer,
Yael. 2016. “The Electoral Environment and Legislator Dissent”, Comparative
Politics, 48(4), pp.557-578. [IF 1.417; 49/161, Q2, 16 citations]
I assert that since
electoral systems and selection processes are substitutive means for ensuring a
parties’ unified voting record the magnitude of the effect of candidate
selection processes on legislators’ behavior will depend on the degree to which
voters are allowed to disturb the party’s ballot at the general election stage.
Since candidate selection procedures may vary within an electoral system,
legislators might face contradictory incentives. While the electoral rules may
encourage legislators to personalize, selections may incentivize them to behave
in a party-centered way. Alternatively, while electoral systems incentivize
party centeredness, selection procedures may encourage representatives to
emphasize personal reputation. Given the possibility for contradictory
incentives, I hypothesize and empirically examine how these contradictory
incentives would affect legislators’ tendencies to dissent. I originally argue
that the effect of elections and selections on legislators’ tendency to dissent
is conditional, and that legislators who face contradictory incentives will
tend to maintain voting discipline. On the other hand, when the incentives of
elections and selections align, they tend to amplify one another. This is
especially true when elections and selections both incentivize personalization.
In this paper, I measure legislators’ behavior as the percentage of times a
legislator voted against his party majority and I test and find support for the
conditional hypothesis using an original individual-level dataset with 6,776
legislators from 180 parties in 30 country-sessions.
This paper adds to our
theoretical and empirical understanding of legislators’ behavior in multiple
ways: to begin with, it challenges the amalgamation between elections and
selections, which is prevalent in the current literature, and hypothesizes
about their combined conditional effect. As such, the paper studies the way
political institutions interact in influencing elites’
behavior, and more realistically depict the possibility that legislators are
facing conflicting incentives produced by differing and separate political
institutions. Second, while most research to date used a party-level measure of
behavior, (e.g., Rice or weighted Rice scores ), and those few that used
individual level measurement confined the scope of research to one or only a
few countries, in this paper I present an individual level, cross-national
analysis of institutional effects on legislators’ behavior. To this end, I
collected an original dataset containing individual level voting data for more
than 6,700 legislators from 30 country sessions.
Shomer
Yael, Gert-Jan Put and Gedalya-Lavy Einat. 2016. "Intra-Party
Politics and Public Opinion: How Candidate Selection Processes Affect Citizens’
Satisfaction with Democracy", Political Behavior, 38(3), pp.
557-578. [IF 2.868; 9/161, Q1, 46 citations].
This article investigates how the internal
democratic practices of political parties—specifically, the procedures used for
selecting candidates—affect citizens’ satisfaction with democracy. While
political parties are widely acknowledged as critical institutions in
representative democracies, their influence on public opinion is often
understudied. Drawing on a unique cross-national dataset covering 130 parties
across 28 democracies, as well as in-depth analyses of Belgium and Israel, the
authors assess whether voters who support parties with more democratic
candidate selection processes report higher satisfaction with how democracy
functions in their country.
The study finds a consistent relationship:
democratic candidate selection processes are positively associated with
citizens’ satisfaction with democracy. This association holds in both the
cross-national analysis and in the case studies of Israel and Belgium, where
selection mechanisms vary significantly. The findings suggest that intra-party
democracy enhances democratic legitimacy from the ground up by shaping how
citizens perceive the broader political system. This research contributes to
the literature on political representation and democratic attitudes by
highlighting the role of meso-level institutions—political parties—in mediating
public trust and democratic satisfaction.
Rosas,
Guillermo, Shomer, Yael and Haptonstahl, Steve. 2015. “No News is News:
Non-Ignorable Non-Response in Roll-Call Data Analysis”, American Journal of
Political Science 59(2), pp. 511-528. [IF 4.506; 3/161, Q1 73
citations].
Roll-call votes are widely employed to infer
the ideological proclivities of legislators. However, many roll-call matrices
are characterized by high levels of nonresponse. Under many theoretical
circumstances and political contexts, nonresponse cannot be assumed to be
ignorable. Put it differently legislators “register” non-response (either by
actively abstaining or by actively absenting themselves from the vote)
strategically. In this innovative paper we examine the consequences of
violating the ignorability assumption that underlies current prevalent methods
of roll-call analysis. We first motivate our analysis by documenting the
prevalence of item nonresponse in legislatures around the world. Second, we
originally try to understand and document the severity of assuming strategic
roll-call non-responses are ignorable. We then present a basic estimation
framework to model nonresponse and vote choice concurrently and we build a
model that captures the logic of competing principals that underlies accounts of
nonresponse in many legislatures. We show that IRT models that assume random
ignorable missingness generate biased inferences about ideal points compared to
a model that incorporates assumptions from the competing principals logic. The
MCMC simulations further show that this bias increases substantially with the
rate of nonresponse. Lastly, we revisit two debates in international relations
and American politics concerning abstentions in the United Nations General
Assembly during the height of the Cold War, and the question of the “most
liberal senator” that has come up in recent U.S. presidential elections. Indeed
we show that modeling the process that ostensibly drives abstentions allows us
to recover more consensual estimates of the distances that existed between the
Soviet Union and some of its satellites and dispels the image of presidential
hopefuls in the United States as ideological extremists.
The simulations as well as real world data show
that modeling presumed patterns of nonignorable nonresponse can yield important
inferential payoffs over current models that assume random missingness. We,
therefore, encourage scholars to think actively and carefully about potential
processes that might generate strategic absences and abstentions in the
legislatures they study. Before reaching conclusions about the ideological
profiles of legislators, it is important to gauge the sensitivity of different legislator’s
ideal points to nonignorable abstention-generating mechanisms deemed relevant
in the legislature at hand.
Shomer,
Yael. 2015. "Electoral Incentives and Individual Parliament
Members’ Rights", West European Politics, 38(5), pp. 1106-1127. [IF
1.692; 38/161, Q1, 5 citations].
Cameral procedures define the modus operandi of
a parliament. While the vast majority of the literature study the effect
cameral procedures have on executive-legislative relationships, I originally
focus scholarly attention on an additional dimension which is directly affected
by legislative procedures: the individual MP vis-à-vis the leadership
dimension. I, thus, broaden the scope of institutional structures that affect
legislative behavior, by focusing attention on an often neglected institution
in the comparative literature: intra-cameral procedures. In addition to arguing
that legislative procedures affect politicians’ rights and the balance of power
between the individual MP vis-à-vis the leadership, I also claim that cameral
procedures are not a static institution. Therefore, I innovatively, present a
theory of cameral procedure amendments that result from the external
electoral-selectoral environment. I argue that governments’ incentives to
restrict Parliament Members’ (MPs‘) rights are affected by MPs‘ (s)electoral
motivation to emphasize individualistic behavior at the expense of their
party’s reputation, hence overusing (arguably abusing) their individual rights.
Governments and the Heads of the Executive in particular will react to these
electoral incentives by restricting and limiting MPs’ rights in the cameral
procedures.
In the article I specifically hypothesize that
when the electoral environment motivates legislators to act individualistically
governments are incentivised to restrict cameral procedures to curtail
legislators’ behaviour. I further contend that materialising such incentives
depends on the government’s ability to pass restrictive procedural changes. To
test the theory, four decades (1967–2007) of amendments to the Israeli
Knesset’s rules of procedure were examined and support provided for
co-variation of changes to the (s)electoral environment (emphasizing
individualistic behavior) and restrictiveness of the Knesset’s procedures. The
analysis then details the factors that enabled Israeli governments to pass such
restrictive measures. The analysis reveals that governments in Israel seem to
use the rules of procedure strategically in their attempt to improve their
control and curtail legislators’ behaviour. As such, legislative rules are
tools used by political leaders and the executive to attenuate hypothesized
personalized incentives produced by external institutions such as electoral
systems and candidate selection processes.
Shomer,
Yael. 2014. "What Affect Candidate Selection Processes? A
Cross-National Examination", Party Politics, 20(4), pp. 533-546.
[IF 2.286; 19/161, Q1, 127 citations].
This article seeks to examine empirically what
factors account for variation in candidate selection processes. After
identifying the key assertions developed in the literature, I use an original
cross-national dataset with data on the selection procedures of 512 parties in
46 countries (the largest comparative dataset to the best of my knowledge) to
examine whether a party’s ideology, size, regime type, territorial organization
and region affect the way parties select their legislative candidates.
In the article I pay special and close
attention to the hypothesized relationships between electoral systems and
selection processes. This is because most of the literature on the effects of
institutions on legislators’ behavior often amalgamated elections and
selections. I argued that underlying this amalgamation is an assumption that
electoral systems determine candidate selection processes. Only to the degree
to which electoral systems determine parties’ selection processes can scholars
amalgamate elections and selections into a single (and the same) institution,
and study its effect on behavior. The results from the analysis empirically
challenge the literature’s amalgamation.
The article’s contribution to the study of
candidate selection processes and legislators behavior is twofold. On the one
hand, this is the largest cross-national analysis (to the best of my knowledge)
of candidate selection processes’ determinants, in which the appropriate unity
of analysis is used: a party prior to a given election. On the other hand, the
results from the paper laid the ground for the my argument that literature
should differentiate elections from selections and allow for the theoretical and
empirical possibility that elections and selection might produce combined
conflicting incentives for parties’ and legislators’ behavior.
Shomer,
Yael and O’Brien, Diana. 2013. “A Cross-National Analysis of Party
Switching”, Legislative Studies Quarterly, 38(1), pp. 111-141.[IF 1.239;
50/143, Q2, 154 citations]
Though interparty movement has been documented
in legislatures across a number of countries, and although party switching can
significantly influence democratic representation and governance, there has
been comparatively little systematic cross-national research on party
switching. Thus, the prevalence of switching is unknown and the extent to which
party- and system-level variation influences this behavior remains unclear. To
address this lacuna, we have conducted the most comprehensive study of intra
session party switching that has ever been undertaken. Using our original
dataset, we begin by examining the prevalence of party switching across 239
party-level observations in 20 democratic regimes. To theoretically explain
variation in the presence and prevalence of party switching both across and
within legislatures, we draw on the theoretical literature on intraparty
switching and legislators’ behavior. We specifically look at the relationship
between legislators’ motivations, institutional determinants and party
switching.
This article makes two major contributions to
the study of interparty movement. First, using the largest and most
comprehensive cross-national dataset on party-level switching ever constructed,
we illustrate that contrary to popularly held assumptions, party switching
occurs much more frequently than previously asserted. Of the 239 parties
included in the dataset, almost one-third (78) exhibited some switching. This
is an important finding in and of itself, as it demonstrates that defection is
not a rare phenomenon, but instead a serious issue facing parties in democratic
states. This in turn calls for scholars of legislative politics to dedicate
greater attention to the study of interparty movement. In addition to showing
the prevalence of party switching, we offer new insights into the determinants
of this behavior. The results from our varying-intercept random effects models
demonstrate that motivational factors influence interparty movement, while
the direct effect of institutional arrangements is minimal. We
suggest that future research will have to amend our treatment of the
motivational and institutional treatments as two distinct theoretical
approaches and treat motivations and institutions as endogenous to one another.
Shomer,
Yael. 2009. “Candidate Selection Procedures, Seniority, and Vote-Seeking
Behavior: Lessons from the Israeli Experience.” Comparative Political
Studies, 42(7), pp. 945-970. [IF 1.908; 16/91, Q1, 129 citations]
It has been argued that inclusive and
decentralized selection procedures create greater incentives for
parliamentarians to enhance their personal reputations. However, while the
observable implications of this theory are at the level of individual members,
the empirical data often brought to bear on this question to date have been
collected at an aggregate level-– the partisan bloc or legislative term.
Despite some previously positive aggregate results I find no discernible
support for the connection between candidate-selection procedures and
vote-seeking behavior in Israel at the individual parliamentarian level. I
suggest an alternative theory—based on the stage of the legislative career—that
explains both individual-level behavior and the aggregate-level trend.
Rosas, Guillermo and Yael Shomer. 2009.
“Non-ingnorable Abstentions in Mexico’s Instituto Federal Electoral". In The
Political Economy of Democracy, ed. Enriqueta Aragonès, Carmen Beviá,
Humberto Llavador and Norman Schofield, pp. 245-261.
The purpose of this paper is to explore
empirically some of the effects of assuming different abstention-generating
mechanisms on the estimation of ideal points. For this purpose, we inspect a
small committee, the Council-General of the Mexican Federal Electoral Institute
(IFE, by its Spanish acronym). Though we start from common wisdom propositions
about the putative ideological profiles of IFE Councilors, we do not purport to
provide a theoretically-nuanced approximation to the ideological organization
of this Council. Instead, we use the Council’s roll-call record to gauge how
inferences about ideology would be affected by different assumptions about
Councilors’ motivations to abstain. In this regard, our approach to the
politics of IFE is unabashedly empirical, and indeed the choice of this
committee as an object of study is driven by various characteristics that we
deem desirable in this kind of exploratory analysis: IFE’s Council-General is a
committee made up of a handful of with known political sponsors, it decides on
extremely important electoral matters, and it produces a relatively high
incidence of abstentions.
Rosas,
Guillermo and Yael Shomer. 2008. “Models of Nonresponse in Legislative
Politics.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 33(4), pp. 573-601. [1.061;
35/89, Q2, 68 citations].
Tools dedicated to inferring the ideological
leanings of legislators from observed votes–techniques such as Nominate (Poole
and Rosenthal 1997) or the item-response theory model of Clinton, Jackman and
Rivers (2004)–are based on the assumption that the political process that
generates abstentions is ignorable, an assumption that is not always easy to
justify. We extend the item-response theory model to analyze abstention and
voting processes simultaneously in situations where abstentions are suspected to
be non-random. We apply this expanded model to two assemblies where the
existing literature gives us reasons to expect non-random abstentions, and
suggest how our extensions yield nuanced analyses of legislative politics. We
also acknowledge limits to our ability to decide on the adequacy of alternative
assumptions about abstentions, since these are not readily verifiable.
Crisp,
Brian F., Kathryn M. Jensen, and Yael Shomer. 2007. “Magnitude and Vote
Seeking.” Electoral Studies 26(4), pp. 727-734. [IF 1.067; 23/84, Q2, 130 citations].
In one of the most frequently cited articles
published in Electoral Studies, Carey and Shugart [Cary, J.M.Shugart, M.S.
1995. Incentives to cultivate a personal vote: a rank ordering of electoral
formulas. Electoral Studies 14(4), 417-439] hypothesized that the number of
copartisans faced relative to seats available had a differential effect on the
incentive to cultivate a personal vote depending on whether electoral rules
allowed for intra-party competition. Across a wide array of electoral systems,
we show that the number of candidates fielded per party varies within districts
and that the variation is not systematically related to the total number of
seats available. Thus, the widespread use of magnitude as a proxy for
‘‘copartisan crowdedness’’ is systematically inaccurate.We argue that the
observed number of copartisans faced makes clear that a ratio to capture vote
seeking incentives needs a party-in-adistrict denominator to accompany the
party-in-a-district numerator. That denominator is the expected number of seats
to be won by each party in question.