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Who Gets What, When, How – Through Which Electoral System?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Rein Taagepera and
Matt Qvortrup
Rein Taagepera*
Affiliation:
University of Tartu and University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA
Matt Qvortrup*
Affiliation:
Department of Management and Security, Cranfield University, UK Defence Academy, SW8 9LA, Swindon
*
E-mail: rtaagepe@uci.edu
E-mail: m.qvortrup@cranfield.ac.uk
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Abstract

When it comes to the impact of institutions such as electoral systems, parliamentary or presidential systems and executive–legislature relations, political science has predominately been preoccupied with their political effects, such as whether they lead to two-party or multi-party systems and whether stable governments result. What has been less discussed and researched are the policy implications of different electoral systems. Do they lead to more economic growth? Does Proportional Representation lead to higher budget deficits? Do majoritarian systems lead to more or less political violence? The shortage of research analysing these questions is surprising. This article critically outlines the research to date, summarises the main results and points to methodological problems in the literature before it outlines a framework for future research analysing how the choice of electoral system affects policy output. The main recommendation is that, before trying to connect policy outputs to broad labels such as ‘Proportional Representation’, which can cover significantly different systems, one should investigate the connection of policy outputs to intervening variables such as the effective number of parties and the mean duration of cabinets.

Keywords

policyinstitutionselectoral systems

Information

Type
Symposium
Information
European Political Science , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , June 2012, pp. 244 - 258
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 European Consortium for Political Research

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