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Experimental research has demonstrated that strains to uniformity, or “Groupthink,” can lead individuals to give answers they know are incorrect and can lead groups to adopt under-considered solutions. As famously documented by Solomon Asch (1955, 1956), dissent can diminish the negative influences of social pressures. Moreover, dissent is more likely to emerge when groups are diverse, rather than homogeneous. .x000d.I argue that this framework can be applied to the study of electoral systems. Pluralitarian systems tend to exacerbate this phenomenon because they limit dissent. On issues such as crime, major parties can become enthralled in a “one-upsmanship” dynamic, where they emphasize their tough-on-crime credentials. In a multi-party setting, dissenting positions are more likely to receive attention..x000d.I argue that this framework helps explain why countries with pluralitarian electoral systems tend to exhibit more aggressive policy outcomes than countries with proportional electoral institutions, especially for policy areas linked to personal security (e.g., crime and national defense). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modernization theory argues that industrialization and socio-economic development lead to significant cultural changes. A key mechanisms identified by this theory is that socio-economic development contributes to the diversification of human interactions. A tractable way to explore the effects of information diversity is to focus on how electoral institutions influence individual preferences. Electoral institutions meaningfully affect the number and breadth of political perspectives to which citizens have access and we should therefore expect them to affect information optimality, and consequently, they should affect public preferences. I use data from the World Values Survey to demonstrate that citizens in parliamentary, proportional representation systems tend to hold preferences that are more cosmopolitan than those of citizens in more majoritarian systems. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Downs (1957) first suggested that competitors will face different positioning incentives under different electoral rules. This version of spatial modeling (often referred to as proximity theory) takes perhaps the clearest position on how parties will behave under two-party and multi-party systems, in that it can predict quite opposite influences on parties operating under the respective types of electoral systems. Generally, in a one-dimensional setting, parties are expected to converge on the median voter in two-party systems, and to disperse themselves in multiparty systems. We use a quasi-experimental approach to examine whether or not these expectations hold. Particularly, we examine the patterns of party behavior observed in Israel and New Zealand as they experimented with major electoral reforms. Each of these countries operated under relatively pure versions of archetypal electoral systems (majoritarian or proportional) and then either adopted core elements belonging to the opposite archetype, or switched archetypes altogether. We use manifesto data to track party positioning behavior before and after these cases of electoral reform. We find that the account related by the manifesto data corroborate the story of convergent versus divergent dynamics posited by proximity theory particularly in the case of New Zealand. For the Israeli case, the theoretical expectations with regard to the major parties are corroborated. The results for the minor parties, however, were mixed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an analysis of the argument that electoral institutions affect the ideological diversity of the political discourse of polity. The author argues that electoral institutions should facilitate the discussion of more sensitive political issues. The author examines, using 1999 World Values survey data, whether such intuition helps explain cross-national variations in attitudes toward 3 issue areas, such as the economic sacrifices for the sake of gains in environmental protection, the justifiability of homosexuality, and the justifiability of euthanasia.

At least since Duverger (1954) and Downs (1957), and as confirmed and given more specific form in much recent literature, we know that ? generally speaking ? electoral systems play an important role in shaping the number and diversity of parties in any given political system. We have also begun to understand how electoral systems shape the diversity of political elites (e.g., Reynolds 1999 on women?s representation) and shape policy outcomes (e.g., Powell 2000). To many democratic theorists, however, democracy is defined as much by the nature of the deliberations of its citizens as its outcomes (e.g., Dryzen 1990, Fishkin 1992, Chambers 1996, Gutmann and Thompson 1996, Elster 1998, Elkin and Soltan 1999, Macedo 1999). Combining these two perspectives, we are led to wonder if electoral systems affect the nature of democratic deliberations. In particular, do electoral systems that encourage a larger number of parties with a greater diversity of policy and ideological positions also encourage more diversity in media discussions of politics? To get a partial answer to this question, we investigate newspaper coverage of elections in New Zealand before and after the 1993-96 electoral reform ? a quasi-experimental (interrupted time series) design ? and find support for the idea. We also discuss other research designs that might provide additional leverage on the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modernization theory argues that industrialization and socio-economic development lead to significant cultural changes. A key mechanisms identified by this theory is that socio-economic development contributes to the diversification of human interactions. A feasible way to explore the impact of information diversity is to focus on how electoral institutions impact individual preferences. Electoral institutions greatly affect the number and breadth of political perspectives to which citizens have access and we should therefore expect them to affect information diversity, and consequently, they should affect public preferences. Data from the World Values Survey are used to demonstrate that citizens in parliamentary systems with proportional representation tend to hold preferences that are generally more cosmopolitan than those of citizens in presidential, more majoritarian systems. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper posits that electoral institutions affect public attitudes on social issues. Individuals with countries with more diverse political discourse will express greater levels of cosmopolitanism across three areas of social attitudes. We argue that certain facets of electoral institutions facilitate the discussion of more sensitive political issues and greater public exposure to these issues should lead to more positive attitudes toward them. We also expect that diversity of information affects traditional values. In particular, we expect this diversity to decrease levels of religiosity. Finally, we argue that greater ideological diversity in the legislature leads to greater levels of societal tolerance for outgroups. To explore these relationships we create three indicators of cosmopolitan attitudes for thirty-five countries based on data from the World Values Survey: acceptance of sensitive issues, religiosity, and tolerance of outgroups. We find that both the effective number of parties and the effective threshold are significant predictors of a nation's cosmopolitanism. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explore whether ideological diversity helps legislatures cope with the massive complexity involved in policy-making, and whether two-party systems tend to produce more reactionary policy-making than multi-party systems. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first phase of a multi-stage research process that aims to uncover how constitutional designs (electoral systems in particular) impact the political discourse of a polity. The hypothesis of this project is derived from Anthony Downs’ theory of democracy1 , which argues that electoral systems create diverging incentives for parties. Single member district plurality (SMDP) systems are said to favor the creation of two-party systems in which the parties will substantively gravitate toward the median voter. Systems that use proportional representation (PR) to dole out legislative seats, on the other hand, will lead to the creation of multi-party systems with parties that will tend to adhere more firmly to particularistic ideologies. This project specifically aims to observe whether or not this phenomenon is captured by the political discourse covered in the media. I hypothesize two things. First, the media in proportional democracies should give greater amounts of coverage to more parties than the media in SMDP systems. Second, because of this coverage we should also expect to observe a broader range, substantively (policy-wise and ideologically), of political discourse in the media of proportional democracies. To ease the burdens of definitions and scope, one country is chosen for examination. New Zealand is a country which has converted from a clear version of SMDP to a clear version of PR (a mixed system patterned on the German model, which Sartori2 assures us is nonetheless fully proportional because the ultimate distribution of seats is determined by the proportional component). In this sense it provides a case of natural experimentation. The independent variable has been applied and we can now observe some of the consequences. Consequently, this is a time series design that will involve a content of analysis of the media. It should prove easiest to examine the content of New Zealand’s major newspapers. This should allow for a straight forward quantification of the coverage afforded to minor parties should prove, perhaps via a straight count of the number of articles in which they receive even the briefest of mentions. Quantifying the impact of this coverage on political substance, on the other hand, will surely prove more complicated. Some kind of operationalization will have to be developed to permit an objective quantification of content related to policy or ideology. Currently, two possibilities comes to mind. One, I could focus on marginal concepts which only minor parties can and do promote (e.g. The Greens’ promotion of the precautionary principle), counting the number of articles in which the item is discussed. Second, I could simply count the number of articles in which marginal parties have the opportunity to express policy positions of any kind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]