Participation by social scientists in the design of democratic institutions generally, and electoral systems specifically, has a long—if not always happy—pedigree. The involvement of the legal theorist Hugo Preuss and the sociologist Max Weber in the construction of the Weimar Constitution is well documented.Footnote 142 In more recent years, political scientistsFootnote 143—and electoral system scholars in particular—have been invited, with increasingly frequency, to provide guidance to electoral reformers, sometimes via governmental and diplomatic contacts, other times through non-governmental organizations, and other times via academic institutions.Footnote 144 Events of the Arab Spring and regime changes in the Middle East and Central Asia have created a “boom” in demand for electoral advising.
To explore the role of political scientists as engineers, we conducted a multi-method research project consisting of surveys, case studies, and personal interviews. To capture the preferences of political scientists vis-à-vis electoral rules, we conducted a small survey of APSA members. We administered a second survey to political scientists and other experts who had served as advisors or consultants during episodes of electoral reform. Our research revealed that political scientists have, among other things, presented political parties and legislative commissions with a blueprint for a new election system, drawn lists of options for stakeholders at regional meetings, conducted shuttle diplomacy between government and opposition in the halls of the United Nations headquarters, trained the staff of democracy promotion organizations, and planted the seeds of new ideas—such as Alternative Voting (AV)—in the minds of government officials.
What Political Scientists Think
Few electoral systems are able to achieve all desirable goals simultaneously. Designing electoral systems thus requires clarifying priorities and accepting tradeoffs. A classic tradeoff is between the inclusion of political and social diversity on the one hand and government accountability on the other. The conventional wisdom maintains that most electoral systems can produce either inclusive parliaments that reflect the diversity of public opinion or a decisive government that voters can identify and reward (or punish) at election time (but not both simultaneously).Footnote 145 Most democratic polities tend to emphasize one set of priorities or the other: they are oriented around either a proportional or a majoritarian vision.Footnote 146
To explore the priorities of political scientists, we administered an Internet-based survey to a random sample of APSA members, asking them to rank the importance of different electoral system goals and their opinions about different electoral systems. Political scientists placed the highest value on the goal of accountability of individual legislators, closely followed by the goal of governmental stability. The least important goal was single-party government, with the other six options—including proportionality, a decisive outcome, minority representation, policy correspondence with the median voter, party cohesion, and women's representation—clumped around the middle. With the exception of single-party government, all of these goals were rated, at the minimum and on average, to be “important.”
The goals valued by political scientists were correlated with their electoral system preferences. For example, people who valued proportionality more highly were more likely favorably to rate list-PR, mixed member compensatory, and STV electoral systems. People preferring decisive electoral outcomes were more favorable toward SMD-plurality and two-round systems as well as mixed-member parallel ones. These associations imply that political scientists are familiar and agree with the results of traditional research on electoral systems. Yet their priorities differed: whereas some political scientists upheld proportional visions of democracy, others preferred the majoritarian vision.Footnote 147
What Political Scientists Do
Our research found that political scientists work as electoral system engineers primarily by sharing knowledge about the consequences of different electoral rules and global trends in electoral reform. How and where we do this varies significantly. Some political scientists are intrepid travelers, visiting scores of countries to educate policy makers about electoral rules. Others work mostly at the global and regional levels, sharing information at seminars and conferences attended by stakeholders from multiple countries. Still others never need to leave home: they exert an impact by authoring policy briefs that influence discussions in national and international contexts.
Policy Reports and Briefs
Some of the most important work political scientists do involves writing policy reports and briefs that present typologies, explain theoretical findings, and summarize global and regional patterns. These reports may be very broad (such as Andrew Reynolds, Benjamin Reilly, and Andrew Ellis's handbook on Electoral System Design) or very specific, containing information most relevant for specific issues or countries (such as Pippa Norris's report on options for women's reserved seats in Afghanistan or Mala Htun's report on strategies to get more Afrodescendant women into elected office in Latin America).Footnote 148
Presentations to Global and Regional Audiences
Political scientists deliver presentations at global and regional meetings of policy makers, civic activists, and other stakeholders to inform them of cross-national patterns and present them with menus of options. At these meetings, political scientists supply frameworks and ideas that people can take back and put to use in their individual countries, often more successfully because they have a legitimate academic backing.
The global diffusion of gender quota policies is one area where political scientists working at the global and regional levels have had a broad impact. By attending meetings organized by international organizations and development banks—in addition to contributing to policy briefs and handbooks (such as International IDEA's handbook on Women in Parliament)Footnote 149—scholars have helped to spread information about the quantity of countries with gender quotas, the details of the new laws, and their effects on getting women elected. This comparative knowledge has helped stakeholders understand why some quota laws work better than others and which aspects of poorly-functioning laws needed to be fixed.
Country Missions
In greater numbers, political scientists are traveling to individual countries to offer information and guidance, usually in seminars and smaller meetings, about options and consequences of electoral reform. Most trips are arranged by democracy-promotion organizations (such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) or the National Democratic Institute (NDI)) but may also occur at the behest of national governments.
Much of the work political scientists do on these trips involves educating policy makers, civil society advocates, journalists, and others about varieties of electoral systems, their anticipated consequences, and real world experiences. John Carey, for example, has conducted crash courses running from one day to about a week for members of parliament in Yemen and Jordan, countries with limited democratic experience in a region with sparse history of competitive elections. In both cases, the executive branch had made a public commitment to send an electoral reform proposal to parliament, but most members of parliament themselves had little idea what the range of reform alternatives actually consisted of.
His job was not to advocate for a specific reform, but to provide actors on the ground with a grasp of basic concepts (for example, what a list-proportional system is, what a mixed system is, how various formulas for converting votes to seats operate). The politicians would later be asked to evaluate and approve (or disapprove or amend) electoral reform proposals. He helped them gain a broader understanding of the various electoral system design options—that is, what the potential menu looks like—and provided accounts of how various electoral systems have operated in other countries.
On the other hand, many political scientists do offer specific recommendations for reform.Footnote 150 Jørgen Elklit helped convince members of the Lesotho parliament to support introduction of a mixed-member electoral system, for example. In many informal discussions stretching over a twenty-year period, Arend Lijphart pressed South Africans to adopt a list-PR system. During multiple trips to Israel, Simon Hix initially proposed a mixed-member electoral system and later, based on his scientific research with John Carey, a PR system with multi-member districts of between four and 11 seats.Footnote 151 In a briefing to the Reeve Commission (charged with recommending constitutional changes for Fiji), Donald Horowitz proposed that AV might be suitable given the territorial intermixing of ethnic groups and the existence of more than one party per ethnic group. He reports that AV was subsequently adopted, with many exchanges of preference votes across ethnic lines in the 1999 elections.
During conference presentations and meetings with policy makers in Chile (one of the few Latin American countries without a gender quota law), Mala Htun proposed that they eschew a women's quota and adopt a French-style gender parity law. Instead of granting women a right to representation as a particular social group, a parity law requires that candidates for elected office reflect the universal duality of the human condition as divided equally between men and women.Footnote 152 Htun believed that the philosophical rationale behind parity—based on universal and individualist principles, not group rights—as well as its practical application (50/50) was more suitable to Chile's political culture and two-member district electoral system than a 30 or 40 percent quota policy.
Training Staff of Democracy Promotion Organizations
Political scientists are often invited to provide training in electoral systems designs for the staff of democracy-promotion organizations. Shaheen Mozaffar, for example, has conducted workshops for USAID Democracy Officers based in Washington, DC, and in country missions. Similar to the “crash courses” offered by political scientists abroad, these workshops introduced senior staff to key features of different electoral systems, their effects on political life, and the ways they can be adapted to different contexts. Since Democracy Officers in country missions are often nationals of those countries, the workshops helped to create a cadre of people with locally-grounded knowledge of electoral systems.
On the Spot Policy Advice
Some political scientists receive urgent requests to offer advice and information to policy makers. Andy Reynolds reports receiving a phone call from the United Nations asking about how big the Liberian parliament should be. In addition, Andy Reynolds and John Carey authored a short paper for the National Security Council about Egypt's electoral rules, which helped to raise awareness within the Obama administration about the implications of sticking with the majoritarian tendencies of the old Mubarak system.
What are the issues on which political science consultants are asked to weigh in? According to our second, short survey of political science consultants, in more than three-quarters of instances agendas included whether parliamentary elections should be single-winner or multiple-winner contests (or some combination of these), questions of the size and structure of electoral districts, the choice of electoral formula and thresholds for representation, and the design of ballot structure. More technical questions about the process of voter registration, election monitoring, vote counting, fraud, and arbitration lagged substantially in the consulting dossiers of our survey respondents.
Increasingly, however, political scientists are turning, both as scientists and as engineers, to questions of electoral administration.Footnote 153 Shaheen Mozaffar, for example, was a member of an international team of experts recruited by Elections Canada to provide technical assistance to the Interim Iraqi Election Commission. His task was to assess the organization and conduct of polling and vote counting in all three elections held in 2005, and his reports included recommendations for improving the process in subsequent elections.
More attention by political scientists to election administration issues will complement and enrich existing scholarship and enhance their real-world contributions as engineers. Good administration is crucial for securing the credibility of democratic elections. By establishing procedural certainty in the organization and conduct of electoral competition, good administration ensures the substantive uncertainty of electoral outcomes.Footnote 154 In new democracies, voter perceptions of the fairness of electoral administration improves their perceptions of the freeness of elections. This helps to mitigate distrust among political actors and facilitate the acceptance of election results, especially by losers. Election administration affects the credibility of elections in established democracies as well. In the United States, controversies over the 2000 presidential election in Florida and the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore, not to mention sustained and acrimonious debate over voter registration and fraud, have motivated some observers to question the legitimacy of the electoral process.Footnote 155
Do Political Scientists Make a Difference?
By drawing on their theoretical knowledge and experience with electoral rules in multiple contexts, political scientists broaden the perspective of policy makers and other stakeholders and expand the menu of options available to them. As Pippa Norris puts it,
what Western political scientists can bring to the table is familiarity with broader comparisons and generalizations so that parallels can be drawn between, say, gender quotas in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or local government and conflict management in Nepal and India or constitution-building in Sudan and Sub-Saharan Africa. It is understanding the broader picture which is so vital for electoral engineering, by widening the range of policy options on the table and giving local stakeholders an awareness of more potential solutions which can be found in comparable societies.
Footnote 156What did policy makers and other stakeholders do with the knowledge shared by political scientists? Were they merely enlightened by our presentation of global trends and theories, or did our work actually compel them to change their behavior? We have anecdotal evidence of the impact of political science ideas, including the adoption of AV in Fiji, PR in South Africa, and MMP in Lesotho, as well as the size of the Liberian parliament. We lack systematic evidence that political science knowledge compelled actors to choose courses of action they would not have taken otherwise. In fact, some of our evidence reveals the opposite: actors on the ground picked and chose among the scientific findings that were most useful to their purposes.
According to our survey of political scientists who had been on consulting missions abroad, local political actors were motivated primarily by partisan (or personal, sectarian movement) concerns, and inclined to draw on the content provided by academic consultants selectively, when that content could be used to bolster positions motivated by other factors.Footnote 157 Simon Hix, for example, travelled to Israel on several occasions to propose options for electoral reform, but the opposition Likud party and several smaller parties repeatedly blocked change. The schemes under consideration—including raising the threshold for representation and introducing smaller districts—would have helped larger parties to gain more seats and stabilized coalition governments but would have harmed the smallest parties. The very problem Hix and others were invited to try to correct—the inflated power of small parties over coalition formation and stability–prevented them from making any progress.
This example highlights a broader issue in social science research: the difficulty of disentangling the effects of institutions from those of the conditions in which they are operating.Footnote 158 Electoral rules, though commonly analyzed as a cause of party systems, are also its effect.Footnote 159 Politicians want systems that preserve their positions and maximize their power. Reformers seek advice for various reasons, among which pursuit of the best science may not predominate. Political scientists can transmit their knowledge—and the discipline has produced many results relevant to reformers in recent decades—but reformers will deploy that knowledge to their own ends.
Conclusion
Many of the central areas of research in contemporary electoral studies map closely onto the issues on which electoral reformers seek guidance. More and more, international institutions, democracy-promotion organizations, and national governments are turning to political scientists to present them with options for reform and to educate them about the consequences of different electoral rules and regulations. Though reformers may not always follow expert advice, their choices are likely to be informed by political science research. By applying knowledge about the consequences of different electoral rules, political scientists make a broad impact on the world.
