The Effect of Electoral Systems on Legislator Behaviour

• In Event: Speeches, Strategies and Institutions in Parliamentary Systems of Government

Abstract

A significant literature seeks to explain the effect of electoral systems on legislators’ behaviour. However, most of this research is either cross-national in nature, or focusses on variations of electoral incentives within a single system, such as the list position or majority size of a legislator. The lack of within-system variation on the key variable of interest, the electoral system by which legislators are elected, means that inferences about the effects of electoral systems at the level of individual legislators are problematic. Mixed-member systems provide a partial solution to this problem, by allowing for the observation of the activities of MPs elected by different systems in the same legislature; however, given self-selection into different types of seats as well as dual candidacies, inferences based on such systems are also problematic, and do not allow us to observe variation at the level of the individual. This paper seeks to overcome these problems by analysing a legislature where it is possible to observe the same individuals facing different electoral systems. The French Senate features multiple changes to the threshold used to determine whether the Senators from a Department are elected by majority vote or by proportional representation, providing within-Senator variation in electoral incentives. Employing a difference-in-difference design, and drawing on data on the introduction of bills (1977-2017) and amendments (2001-2017), the giving of speeches (2003-2017), and the asking of questions (1978-2017), the paper shows how different activities are influenced by variations in incentives structures, and advances our understanding of the effects of electoral systems by observing the behaviour of the same individual facing different electoral incentives.
 

Author

• David Munck Willumsen, University of Innsbruck