The determinants of electoral reforms in the interparty dimension

The effect of democratic experience on electoral reform is evident in the differences between old and young democracies displayed in Table 4.1. Drawing on comparisons across all the democracies included in the analysis, the data indicate that the probability of adopting a new electoral system is directly related to the level of democratic experience. The second interesting finding is that the ratio of institutional movements towards more and less proportionality in old democracies does not differ significantly from that observed in new ones. Finally, an additional general conclusion can be drawn from this evidence: in the countries analyzed, there has not been a predominant trend towards the adoption of more permissive electoral systems. Hence, the evidence does not fit Colomer’s expectation (2005: 2) about the existence of a general drift towards higher proportionality.

152 Results are displayed in Table A2.5 of Appendix 2, and do not fundamentally change.

132 Table 4.1. Democratic age and the types of electoral reforms in the interparty dimension, 1945-2010 multivariate regression analysis for seven separate models. Model 1 only measures the effect of party system fragmentation, while Models 2-4 introduce sequentially electoral disproportionality, volatility and democratic age. Models 5-7 test the validity of the interactive hypotheses, and Figures 4.3-4.5 show the marginal effects for them given an increasing level of disproportionality and volatility, and democratic age. According to Thomas Brambor et al.

(2006) and Cindy Kam and Robert Franzese (2007), the effect of an interaction term cannot be evaluated through the p-value shown in the regression table. Thus, it is necessary to graphically illustrate the marginal effect of party system fragmentation on the likelihood of electoral reform as the value of the modifying variable changes.

Although party system fragmentation is a good predictor that the current electoral system will be replaced by a stronger one in the first two models, it is no longer more likely to observe a restrictive reform as the effective number of electoral parties goes up once we control for the level of volatility (Models 1-3). Likewise, the likelihood of permissive reforms also seems to be unaffected by party system fragmentation in all the three first models. By contrast, the predicted probability of adopting a weaker electoral system is higher under remarkably disproportional rules, and in considerably volatile contexts. Moreover, electoral volatility also shapes politicians’

incentives to adopt more restrictive rules. In this regard, results in Model 3 indicate that higher levels of this variable increase the attractiveness of movements towards stronger systems. Hence, high volatility in many democracies creates pressures to trim the permissive nature of the

133 Table 4.2. Descriptive statistics

Variable Mean Std.

Dev. Min. Max. N Party System Fragmentation Electoral Level 4.16 1.74 1.35 12 2,679 Party System Fragmentation Parliamentary

Level 3.49 1.42 1.06 10.4 2,679

Electoral Disproportionality 5.73 4.81 0.34 34.5 2,679

Electoral Volatility 16.91 16.59 0.3 100 2,679

Democratic Age(logged) 3.31 0.91 0 4.52 2,679

Time 18.706 15.67 1 66 2,679

Political Constraints Index 0.43 0.12 0 0.72 2,657

Real GDP per Capita(in 1,000s) 16.12 9.69 1.89 77.8 2,418

Ideology of the Government 2.09 0.93 1 3 1,714

Changes of Prime Minister 0.34 0.84 0 5 1,102

Legislative Success Rates 76.98 18.12 10.7 100 852

Polarization 1.09 0.92 0 2 1,728

electoral system and try to impose structure through more restrictive rules (Bielasiak 2006: 421).

Finally, the negative coefficient for democratic age with regard to both types of electoral system changes supports the argument that parties are shying away from electoral reforms as elites and voters get more experienced.

Next, I explore the role of electoral disproportionality and volatility, and democratic age more in depth. Specifically, I aim to investigate the extent to which they modify the positive effect of party system fragmentation on restrictive electoral reform. I do this by re-estimating Models 2-4 but including as additional independent variables the following interaction terms:

Effective_Number_of_Electoral_Parties*Disproportionality_Index,

Effective_Number_of_Electoral_Parties*Volatility_Index, and

Effective_Number_of_Electoral_Parties*Democratic_Age (logged). In the first two cases, the focus is on whether disproportionality and volatility are effective at removing the positive effect of party system fragmentation on restrictive reforms. And, in fact, they partially are. While the precise magnitude and statistical significance of the coefficients are hard to interpret given the categorical and interactive nature of the dependent and independent variables, respectively, the estimates in columns 5 and 6 suggest that high levels of disproportionality and/or volatility undo some of the direct effect of party system fragmentation on restrictive reforms. By contrast, the

134 Table 4.3. Determinants of electoral reform in the interparty dimension: Discrete time duration models/Binary times-series cross-section models

VARIABLES Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6 Model 7

Permissive coefficient coefficient coefficient coefficient coefficient coefficient coefficient

Reform (se) (se) (se) (se) (se) (se) (se)

Party System Fragmentation -0.019 -0.086 -0.056 -0.026 0.001 -0.114 -0.567***

(Electoral Level) (0.076) (0.077) (0.078) (0.076) (0.137) (0.164) (0.214)

Electoral Disproportionality 0.094*** 0.111** 0.018 0.073***

(0.015) (0.048) (0.031) (0.018)

Electoral Volatility 0.028*** 0.018** 0.0194 0.021***

(0.007) -0.00782 (0.022) (0.008)

Democratic Age(logged) -0.373*** -0.303* -0.236 -1.037***

(0.128) (0.17) (0.266) (0.342)

Electoral Disproportionality -0.008 0.088 -0.099* -0.055

(0.025) (0.082) (0.051) (0.033)

Electoral Volatility 0.029*** 0.028*** 0.098*** 0.031***

(0.008) (0.008) (0.032) (0.008)

Democratic Age(logged) -0.535*** -0.460* -0.193 -1.236***

(0.197) (0.261) (0.406) (0.335)

135

N (Observations) 2,883 2,853 2,700 2,883 2,679 1,722 2,679

Chi² 54.18*** 104.75*** 78.57*** 90.72*** 127.25*** 80.74*** 124.72***

Pseudo-R² 0.04 0.06 0.07 0.06 0.09 0.11 0.10

Note: The dependent variable takes value 0 if there is no reform or the reform that takes place has an ambiguous impact in the interparty dimension; 1 if it is supposed to produce less disproportionality; and 2 if it is supposed to produce more disproportionality. Cluster standard errors by terms in parentheses. * Significant at 0.10; **

Significant at 0.05; *** Significant at 0.01 (two-tailed tests). The counter of stability years and the cubic splines are included but not shown.

estimates for permissive reforms are statistically insignificant again. These are some of the main results of the chapter.¹⁵³

Yet, perhaps one of the most important questions, given the heterogeneous sample of countries, is whether democratic experience contributes to effectively foster the impact of party system fragmentation on electoral reform. The estimates are reported in column 7 of Table 4.3 and suggest that the important role of the number and size of parties in adopting a new electoral system changes radically as democracies age. First, the coefficient of the constitutive term of party system fragmentation on restrictive reforms is very close to zero and only statistically significant at the 10% level. This result supports the idea that short-term horizons of parties and failure of accountability mechanisms in new democracies offset the incentives of political actors to enact efficient electoral reforms despite their apparent popularity. But the positive estimate of the interaction term also suggests that lots of small parties lead to more restrictive systems in the long run. This indicates that an unconditional model specification that did not take account of the modifying impact of democratic age would misleadingly suggest that a fragmented party system always leads to an increase in the likelihood of a restrictive reform.¹⁵⁴

153 All the models of Table 4.3 are re-estimated but including the effective number of parliamentary instead of electoral parties as the main independent variable. The results for party system fragmentation at the parliamentary level displayed in Table A2.1 in Appendix 2 remain mainly similar, though the statistical significance of the coefficients is remarkably lower.

154 In a supplementary analysis, I also test the effect of the level of democratic age by including a dummy variable, EstablishedDemocracy, which is first coded as “1” for those countries that have remained democratic since the end of World War II and “0” otherwise; and then is coded as “1” for the first three elections since the end of the autocratic rules and “0” otherwise. Results are not shown, but corroborate those using the more elaborate measure of DemocraticAge.

136 Simulations using the CLARIFY software (King et al. 2000; Tomz et al. 2003) and reported in Figures 4.2-4.5 facilitate the interpretation of the marginal effect of the main independent variables. While the information provided in Table 4.3 is informative, it remains somewhat limited for two reasons. First of all, since these are in the end multinomial logistic regressions, the magnitude of the effects cannot be assessed just by looking at the coefficients.

Second, the results in the interactive models do not indicate after all whether party system fragmentation has a statistically significant impact on electoral reform when the value of the modifying independent variables is greater than zero. As a result, I graphically illustrate the probability of a given electoral reform to happen according to the variation of party system fragmentation at the electoral level (Figure 4.2), and the marginal effect of the effective number of electoral parties on the likelihood of institutional change across the observed range of disproportionality, volatility and democratic age (Figures 4.3-4.5). The solid sloping line in this second group of figures indicates how the marginal effect of party system fragmentation changes as the value of the conditioning independent variable increases. One can see whether this effect is statistically significant by considering the two-tailed 90 per cent confidence intervals that are drawn around it (i.e., the dashed lines). The effect of the effective number of electoral parties is distinguishable from zero whenever the upper and lower bounds of the confidence interval are both above (or below) the zero line. Superimposed over the marginal effect plot is a histogram portraying the frequency distribution for the modifying variables (i.e., electoral disproportionality or volatility and democratic age). In the four figures, the observation is at the mean of all other variables included in the model.

The first important conclusion that emerges in Figure 4.2, based on Model 1, is the illustration of the effect of party system fragmentation on the likelihood of restrictive reforms that was already apparent in Table 4.3. By contrast, the effective number of electoral parties has a weaker non-significant effect on the probability of occurrence of permissive reforms. It is, hence, notable that parties in power precisely seem to react in case of high party system fragmentation by enacting a restrictive electoral reform but not the other way around.

137 Figure 4.2. Probability of electoral reform in the interparty dimension as party system fragmentation changes

Note: Results are derived from Table 4.3, Model 1.

Figures 4.3 and 4.4 look remarkably similar.¹⁵⁵ As predicted by the second hypothesis, party system fragmentation has a strong positive effect on restrictive reforms when there is low disproportionality (Figure 4.3). However, this effect declines as the correspondence between parties’ vote and seat shares gets worse. The effective number of electoral parties stops having a statistically significant effect on the likelihood of institutional change once Gallagher’s Disproportionality Index is more than 6. Roughly 50 per cent of legislative elections in the sample have produced a disproportionality lower than this. Hence, the results presented here clearly indicate that party system fragmentation only has a statistically significant effect on restrictive reform when the disproportionality is low. By contrast, it is interesting to note that the

155 I am grateful to Matt Golder for kindly providing in his web page the STATA codes to graph the marginal effects of the multiplicative models used in Brambor et al. (2006).

138 Figure 4.3. Marginal effect of party system fragmentation on electoral reform in the interparty dimension as electoral disproportionality changes

Note: Results are derived from Table 4.3, Model 5.

effective number of parties does actually have no impact if the value of the disproportionality index is sufficiently high. Moreover, this variable fails to have any distinguishable effect from zero on movements towards more proportionality (i.e., permissive reforms).

Likewise, Figure 4.4, based on Model 6, indicates that party system fragmentation will increase the likelihood of restrictive reforms as long as we do not move beyond a given threshold of electoral volatility -Pedersen’s Index = 25. Once again, the equivalent figure from the same model that shows the probability of adopting a permissive electoral system change provides much weaker evidence in support of Hypothesis 3. In this regard, results are not anomalous

139 Figure 4.4. Marginal effect of party system fragmentation on electoral reform in the interparty dimension as electoral volatility changes

Note: Results are derived from Table 4.3, Model 6.

given that the coefficient of Party_System_Fragmentation*Electoral_Volatility on this second category of reforms is insignificant (although positive). However, this last coefficient is perhaps not too surprising given that the hypothesis linking permissive electoral system change and the number of parties was previously rejected in Model 1. Large parties may simply not have incentives to adopt a permissive reform when they become the “only sheriffs in town”, thereby weakening the results.

Finally, what about the effect of democratic age? Figure 4.5 plots the marginal effect of the effective number of electoral parties as democracies get older. On the one hand, and contrary

140 Figure 4.5. Marginal effect of party system fragmentation on electoral reform in the interparty dimension as democracy ages

Note: Results are derived from Table 4.3, Model 7.

to my expectations, it should be clear that party system fragmentation has a strong reductive effect on the likelihood of observing a permissive reform when the democracy is young.

However, this reductive effect declines as the number of years under democracy increases. Once the level of democratic experience becomes sufficiently large (about 8 years), the effective number of parties stops having a significant effect on the likelihood of adopting this kind of institutional change.¹⁵⁶ On the other hand, the figure also indicates that party system fragmentation will reduce the likelihood of restrictive reforms after 10 years of democracy but have no effect before that because this impact depends on the level of democratic experience.

Hence, there is some evidence to support the hypothesis that the likelihood of efficiency-seeking

156 The variable Democratic_Age is logged in order to account for potential non-linearities.

141 reforms, as measured by restrictive electoral system changes when the number of parties goes up, significantly increases once the country goes beyond the first decade of democracy.

Thus far, considerable evidence has been provided about the positive impact of party system fragmentation on restrictive electoral reforms and the modifying role played by the levels of disproportionality and volatility and the number of years under democracy. These findings, however, need to be taken with some caution, since they might be simply due to the omission of the relevant control variables. For this reason, Table A2.2 in Appendix 2 to this thesis displays some robustness checks based on estimates of the previous equations but using the Henisz’s political constraints index, real GDP per capita and the ideology of the government as additional explanatory factors. All the main results remain basically unchanged. More importantly, none of the control variables perform particularly well.¹⁵⁷

As a second robustness check, it needs to be noticed that the findings remain very similar when “extreme” electoral systems are excluded from the analyses (see Table A2.3). FPTP and PR systems with a single-national district are deemed to be “extreme”.¹⁵⁸ None of the interactions between party system fragmentation and the mofidying factors lose statistical significance at traditional levels of confidence in this new group of analyses. Table A2.4 shows the results of the Cox models displayed as coefficients rather than hazard ratios. Party system fragmentation has mixed success in explaining electoral reform there. Moreover, the level of electoral disproportionality or volatility is not a significant modifying factor for the effective number of parties, nor is the number of years under democracy. Finally, when temporal dependence is modelled by including time, time² and time³ in the regressions, the main results do not change either (see Table A2.5).

157 Following the suggestion of Henisz himself, all the main results keep remaining basically unchanged when I use the CHECKS index of the Database of Political Institutions as a robustness check.

158 More specifically, the cases excluded from this part of the analysis are: Canada, Israel (except for 1996 and 1999), Macedonia (1994), Moldova, Netherlands, Slovakia (1998-2010), Ukraine (1994), United Kingdom, United States and Uruguay. As Shugart points out in at least two pieces (2001 and 2008), the performance of a plurality system is not always “extreme” in terms of producing an exaggerated relationship between how people vote and how their representation is distributed across the competing political parties. Were there data on when the system does not generate a clearly indetifiable and accountable majority for the plurality party and a strong opposition to monitor that majority and serve as a potential prospective majority at the next election (i.e., a spurious and lopsided majority, respectively) for all the countries and time periods considered, I could have used them to identify cases of

“extreme” performance of a plurality system. Unfortunately, these data are missing for some of them.

142 4.5.2. Why does party system fragmentation matter?

The statistical evidence presented here suggests that a high degree of party system fragmentation positively affects the probability of changing the rules of the game in a restrictive direction. Now that this pattern has been observed in a range of analyses, I should begin to investigate various explanations for the apparent robustness of this finding. Two hypotheses suggest themselves.

 First, party system fragmentation decreases executives’ (prime ministers or presidents) legislative success rates.¹⁵⁹ When a particular ruler regularly fails to pass legislative packages, he or she becomes less likely to get re-elected. Moreover, this kind of argument is also consistent with the idea that politicians consider efficient institutions to be valuable. Poor lawmaking abilities of chief executives increase, by this account, the likelihood of adopting a more restrictive electoral system. To test this hypothesis, I will use a variable that denotes the proportion of executive initiatives introduced to the legislature that were approved.¹⁶⁰

 The number of parties is also associated with shorter durations of cabinets.¹⁶¹ The informed voter may regard having short-lived governments with a certain amount of apprehensiveness. Like chief executives’ legislative success rates, this pattern also concerns the overall efficiency of the political system. After all, how could one expect a democratic regime to function effectively if its governments fall apart all the time? To test this mechanism, I will use the number of changes of prime minister since the last election.¹⁶²

159 For example, the 1993 Electoral Law was enacted in Poland because parties were typically too small and frail to sustain working legislative majorities (Ka-Lok Chan 2001).

160 Source: Saiegh (2009).

161 At least initially, the pursuit of stable government lies at the heart of the 1994-1996 attempts of changing the electoral system in Slovakia. At that time, Prime Minister Mečiar told his party’s congress that the lessons of 1994 (the fall of his government and the difficulty of forming a new one after early elections) showed that the 5 per cent threshold was not enough to ensure a manageable number of parties (Birch et al. 2002).

162 Source: Hellwig and Samuels (2007). Data for all other cases calculated from information in Keesing's Record of World Events. Readers will notice this solution is far from ideal. Should there be information on only those changes of prime minister that happen between elections, I could have used it in the manuscript. Unfortunately, these data are not available.

143 Table 4.4. Mechanisms of electoral reform in the interparty dimension: Discrete time duration models/Binary times-series cross-section models

VARIABLES Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6 Model 7 Model 8

Permissive coefficient coefficient coefficient coefficient coefficient coefficient coefficient coefficient

Reform (se) (se) (se) (se) (se) (se) (se) (se)

Changes of Prime Minister 0.005 -0.162 0.538* -0.394 (0.409) (0.457) (0.326) (0.67)

Legislative Success Rates -0.017 -0.0102 0.058 0.008

(0.026) (0.028) (0.078) -(0.039) Electoral Disproportionality 0.043 0.038 0.054 0.045 -0.508** -0.382 -0.632** -0.555**

(0.0503) (0.054) (0.051) (0.0507) (0.198) (0.301) (0.261) (0.222)

Legislative Success Rates -0.032* -0.025 -0.046*** -0.002

(0.017) (0.022) (0.017) (0.0209) Electoral Disproportionality -0.053 -0.031 -0.064 -0.052 -0.358** -0.258 -0.430** -0.428*

(0.045) (0.046) (0.055) (0.045) (0.15) (0.281) (0.195) (0.228)

Electoral Volatility 0.048*** 0.0507*** 0.052*** 0.048*** 0.0504* 0.051** 0.081 0.0505 (0.014) (0.015) (0.015) (0.014) (0.026) (0.025) (0.064) (0.035)

144 impact in the interparty dimension; 1 if it is supposed to produce less disproportionality; and 2 if it is supposed to produce more disproportionality. Cluster standard errors by terms in parentheses. * Significant at 0.10; **

Significant at 0.05; *** Significant at 0.01 (two-tailed tests). The counter of stability years and the cubic splines are included but not shown.

These two mechanisms are tested and results are displayed in Table 4.4. Accordingly to the negative findings regarding low party system fragmentation and permissive electoral reforms that we have seen in the previous section, I cannot reject the null hypothesis that very successful lawmakers and long-lived prime ministers are likely to implement permissive reforms in seven out of eight models. By contrast, legislative success rates and prime ministerial durability exert

These two mechanisms are tested and results are displayed in Table 4.4. Accordingly to the negative findings regarding low party system fragmentation and permissive electoral reforms that we have seen in the previous section, I cannot reject the null hypothesis that very successful lawmakers and long-lived prime ministers are likely to implement permissive reforms in seven out of eight models. By contrast, legislative success rates and prime ministerial durability exert

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