"This study analyzes relationships between electoral laws and political party systems on a cross-national scale. Since these relationships are found in any political system with institutionalized, partisan elections--the liberal democracies--this cross-national strategy seems appropriate. Accordingly, I have tried to isolate those relationships between electoral laws and party systems which are general to the twenty liberal democracies included in the study, or to subclasses within the twenty. The emphasis is on the cross-national verification of certain hypothises, expressed as propositions in the text, and not on the description of events unique to individual national histories. These unique events are treated here only as specific instances of broad patterns." -from Preface.

..." a usful volume on the impact of electoral laws...includes a very good bibliography and index...establishes a broader international and interdisciplinary perspective on the methods of representation." - American Political Science Review

Over its lifetime, 'political economy' has had different meanings. This handbook views political economy as a synthesis of the various strands of social science, treating it as the methodology of economics applied to the analysis of political behaviour and institutions.

Publisher Description

There are an astonishing variety of election laws across contemporary democratic societies. In Establishing the Rules of the Game, Louis Massicotte, André Blais, and Antoine Yoshinaka provide the first thorough examination of these laws. The study incorporates original data collected from more than sixty democracies around the world, and touches on oft-ignored, yet extremely important, aspects of election laws. The countries covered by the study include Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, Japan, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Romania, and the United Kingdom. The authors focus on six dimensions of election laws: the right to vote, the right to be a candidate, the electoral register, the agency in charge of the election, the procedure for casting votes, and the procedure to sort out the winners and losers. Massicotte, Blais, and Yoshinaka uncover underlying patterns, explaining why certain types of country tend to adopt a given sets of rules. In general, former colonies adopt the same laws as their former mother country. There is also a tendency for established democracies to be more inclusive than non-established ones. The authors point out sociological patterns and review normative and practical arguments for and against each set of rules, providing invaluable information for students of elections and democratic theory as well as election practicioners.

No subject is more central to the study of politics than elections. All across the globe, elections are a focal point for citizens, the media, and politicians long before--and sometimes long after--they occur. Electoral systems, the rules about how voters' preferences are translated into election results, profoundly shape the results not only of individual elections but also of many other important political outcomes, including party systems, candidate selection, and policy choices. Electoral systems have been a hot topic in established democracies from the UK and Italy to New Zealand and Japan. Even in the United States, events like the 2016 presidential election and court decisions such as Citizens United have sparked advocates to promote change in the Electoral College, redistricting, and campaign-finance rules. Elections and electoral systems have also intensified as a field of academic study, with groundbreaking work over the past decade sharpening our understanding of how electoral systems fundamentally shape the connections among citizens, government, and policy. This volume provides an in-depth exploration of the origins and effects of electoral systems.

From Kosovo to Kabul, the last decade witnessed growing interest in ?electoral engineering?. Reformers have sought to achieve either greater government accountability through majoritarian arrangements or wider parliamentary diversity through proportional formula. Underlying the normative debates are important claims about the impact and consequences of electoral reform for political representation and voting behavior. The study compares and evaluates two broad schools of thought, each offering contracting expectations. One popular approach claims that formal rules define electoral incentives facing parties, politicians and citizens. By changing these rules, rational choice institutionalism claims that we have the capacity to shape political behavior. Alternative cultural modernization theories differ in their emphasis on the primary motors driving human behavior, their expectations about the pace of change, and also their assumptions about the ability of formal institutional rules to alter, rather than adapt to, deeply embedded and habitual social norms and patterns of human behavior.