This symposium offers a general overview of the results of the APSA Presidential Task Force on Electoral Rules and Democratic Governance, organized by then President-Elect Bing Powell in 2011 and chaired by Mala Htun. Since the purpose of APSA task forces is to “expand the public presence of the discipline of political science,”Footnote 1 it seemed to us that the field of electoral rules was a natural focus. It has a variety of important political consequences: electoral rules are one of the crucial forces in making democracy work, and small variations in them can go a long way toward shaping the type of democracy that develops.
Electoral systems constitute one of the oldest and most prolifically studied subjects of our discipline. Hundreds of political scientists dedicate themselves to developing and testing theories about the consequences of electoral rules and regulations for representation, governance, and other aspects of democratic politics. They are currently pushing new frontiers.
Political scientists are engaged in educating and advising policymakers around the world. Sharing and applying knowledge about the consequences of electoral rules is one of the principal ways we make our work relevant. By traveling to different countries, writing policy reports, lecturing at regional and international meetings, and serving as expert witnesses in court, political scientists have educated and expanded the options available to policy makers, political parties, civic groups, and other stakeholders.
Political scientists thus relate to the world of election systems in two ways: as scientists and as engineers. The work of the task force analyzed both of these dimensions, taking stock of the scientific and the engineering contributions of political scientists—mostly U.S.-based ones—to the world of electoral systems. We were fortunate to be able to involve eleven outstanding scholars, some of whom have themselves served actively as consultants, who shared our enthusiasm for the field and were willing to help us analyze its scientific and engineering dimensions: John Carey, Karen Ferree, Simon Hix, Mona Lena Krook, Robert Moser, Shaheen Mozaffar, Andrew Rehfeld, Andrew Reynolds, Ethan Scheiner, Melissa Schwartzberg, and Matthew S. Shugart.
Instead of reviewing the extensive scientific works on how election rules shape disproportionality between votes and seats, the number of parties, governability, and other issues, the symposium focuses on more recent research investigating the ways that context systematically mediates the effects of election rules on political outcomes. Karen Ferree, Bing Powell, and Ethan Scheiner present a general framework to show how contextual features intervene in the causal chains connecting the features of electoral rules with outcomes such as legislative representation or governance. Following this framework, Mona Krook and Robert Moser show how contextual factors influence the incentives electoral rules offer to parties to promote women and minorities as candidates for popular election. Matthew Shugart's essay on how more “open” and “closed” ballot structures shape party competition and individual accountability emphasizes that context can alter these effects. Finally, John Carey and Simon Hix's analysis of the close connection between electoral rules and patterns of socioeconomic redistribution and regulation acknowledges the importance of context: although these relationships hold consistently in the institutionalized party systems characteristic of older democracies, they are less robust in newer ones.
To explore the role of political scientists as engineers, contributors to the symposium adopted a multi-method approach consisting of surveys, case studies, and personal interviews. Results of this research are described in the essay by Carey, Hix, Mala Htun, Shaheen Mozaffar, Powell, and Andrew Reynolds. Our findings reveal the range of political science engineering, from authoring policy reports and briefs, making presentations to global and regional audiences, traveling on country missions to educate and advise policy makers and other stakeholders, offering on-the-spot policy advice, and serving as expert witnesses in redistricting and voting rights litigation.Footnote 2
The scientific and engineering dimensions of the relationship between political scientists and electoral systems are mutually reinforcing. By the 1980s and 1990s, the evolution of the scientific field had yielded solid theoretical generalizations concerning the consequences of single-member district plurality systems versus multi-member, low-threshold proportional representation systems, among other variations. Around the same time, dozens of new democracies had emerged during the “third wave.” As engineers, political scientists were involved in these transitions as policy makers sought their help designing new constitutions, as the essay by Carey, Hix, Htun, Mozaffar, Powell, and Reynolds describes. The consequences of electoral rules in new democracies did not always match theoretical predictions, however.
To explain the anomalies, political scientists as scientists went back to the drawing board, developing fresh theories about how contextual factors intervene to shape electoral rule effects. As the essay by Ferree, Powell, and Scheiner shows, these works incorporate the particularities of local contexts into the internal causal logics of general theories, revealing how context affects the mechanical conversion of votes into seats and how context affects the way electoral rules provide incentives for the behavior of elites and voters. Predictions about how and in what ways context matters gave engineering political scientists additional tools at their disposal when advising democracy promotion organizations and policy makers in new democracies. Effective choice of election rules and regulations depends on both the salience of particular goals and on the interaction of rules and local context.
Political scientists have responded to the challenges of the real world in other ways as well. The mobilization of women and minorities around demands for political inclusion prompted episodes of electoral reform in many established democracies and altered the processes of constitution-making in new ones. Political scientists studying these experiences developed a large body of theory about the consequences of different electoral rules and regulations for the political presence of women and minorities, as the essay by Krook and Moser points out. Engineering political scientists shared this knowledge about global trends and experiences via written reports (commissioned by democracy promotion and other international organizations), presentations at global and regional conferences of stakeholders, and smaller meetings with government officials and civil society groups. Their work spreading information about gender quotas has been an important factor contributing to the global diffusion of these policies.
At the same time, growing evidence about the ways elections are actually practiced in many new democracies (and some older ones)—often involving voter fraud, intimidation, and other irregularities—helped motivate the development of the scientific field of electoral integrity, while mobilizing many political scientists to help to improve these processes as engineers.Footnote 3 As Ferree, Powell, and Scheiner point out in their essay, electoral rules may not have their intended effects in the context of coercion, including illegal acts on election day (such as ballot stuffing, tabulation fraud, voter intimidation, and the like) as well as less visible acts earlier in the electoral cycle such as the introduction of restrictive voter registration laws and partisan gerrymandering of districts.Footnote 4 In addition, variations in electoral integrity may shape the relationship between the electoral system and its operational goals.Footnote 5
Even when rules are followed perfectly, no electoral system can achieve all desirable goals simultaneously, as Andrew Rehfeld and Melissa Schwartzberg's essay notes. A concept as foundational as political equality can be interpreted in distinctive ways: as the equal chance to vote for a winning candidate (thus implying proportionality and inclusion), the equal chance to influence a policymaker (implying single-party government), or the responsiveness of elected representatives to voters' policy preferences (implying ideological congruence). Yet some of these ends are incompatible with others. The choice of an electoral system has normative consequences, requiring a clarification of priorities, acceptance of tradeoffs, and perhaps even the sacrifice of a competing value.
Electoral rules go a long way toward shaping the way democracy develops. They determine whether relevant perspectives are included in decision making, the nature of the government that emerges, the ways in which the public can hold this government accountable, and the pressures on parties to pursue certain modes of socioeconomic redistribution (or not). For democracy to spread and become sustainable, actors on the ground need to know about these relationships and how they are mediated by contextual factors. By developing, testing, and sharing theories about how different electoral designs shape politics, political scientists play an important role in this process.
