Electoral Incentives in Mixed-Member Systems: Party, Posts, and Zombie Politicians in Japan
By Robert J. Pekkanen, Benjamin Nyblade, E. Krauss. American Political Science Review, 2006
123 citations recorded by the source corpus.
How do electoral incentives affect legislative organization? Through an analysis of Japan's mixed-member electoral system, we demonstrate that legislative organization is strongly influenced not only by the individual legislators reelection incentives but also by their interest in their party gaining power and maintaining a strong party label. Electorally vulnerable legislators are given choice legislative positions to enhance their prospects at the polls, whereas (potential) party leaders disproportionately receive posts with greater influence on the party's overall reputation. Members of Parliament elected from proportional representation (PR) lists and in single member districts also receive different types of posts, reflecting their distinct electoral incentives. Even small variations in electoral rules can have important consequences for legislative organization. In contrast to Germany's compensatory mixed-member system, Japan's parallel system (combined with a “best loser” or “zombie” provision) generates incentives for the party to allocate posts relating to the distribution of particularistic goods to those elected in PR.
Subfields: Law, Political Science and International Relations, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/84e8994ffe778427ee98dceae7d206579517d549
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In Political Science and International Relations
In Strategy and Management
Citations in the corpus
- Individualised Constituency Campaigns in Mixed-Member Electoral Systems: Candidates in the 2005 German Elections (2008, background): “We firstly assume with Pekkanen et al. (2006) that the district mode of candidacy overrides the list mode in cases of double candidacies, which is a legal and frequently practised option in the German electoral system.”