13:15 - 15:30
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Álvaro Canalejo-Molero
Discussant/s:
Jane Green
Meeting Room B

Marie-Lou Sohnius, Arndt Leininger, Thorsten Faas, Sigrid Roßteutscher, Armin Schäfer
Temporary Disenfranchisement: Negative Side-Effects of Lowering the Voting Age

Álvaro Canalejo-Molero
Does new party entry increase electoral turnout? Quasi-experimental evidence from the 2015 local Spanish elections

Alexander Held
The Electoral Consequences of Compulsory Voting: New Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Robert Liñeira, Pedro Riera
Why does proportional representation benefit left-wing parties?
Why does proportional representation benefit left-wing parties?
Robert Liñeira 1, Pedro Riera 2
1 University of Glasgow
2 Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Electoral systems have an impact on parties and voters’ ideology as well as government policies. Iversen and Soskice (2006) showed that governments elected under proportional representation favour wealth redistribution policies, a connection that Döring and Manow (2017) attributed to the strategic behaviour of the middle class and the inefficient geographic distribution of left-wing voters. However, these two do not exhaust all the possible mechanisms that connect electoral systems to governments’ ideological orientation. In this paper, we argue that left-wing parties maximize votes, policies and offices under proportional representation, particularly when the mean average district is high, and its variance is small. To test these ideas, we introduce measures of alternative explanations such as malapportionment and differential voter mobilization across districts, as well as an explicit measure of voters’ ideology as a control. We rely on a database that combines data from different comparative sources and our own malapportionment measures, including elections from consolidated democracies since 1945.