Majority, proportionality, governability and factions
Matteo Migheli () and
Guido Ortona ()
POLIS Working Papers from Institute of Public Policy and Public Choice - POLIS
Abstract:
Commonsense wisdom claims that majoritarian parliaments produce more efficient governments than proportional ones, because there are less decisors involved. Empirical evidence gives poor support to this claim. A possible explanation is that the real decisors may be not the parties, but the factions within them. We (a) assumed as factions of parties in system i the parties that provide the same government coalition in pure proportionality, (b) considered some stylized real cases, i.e. Germany, The Netherlands and Italy and (c) looked through simulation for a weight of factions such that governability is lower in FPTP than in threshold proportionality. In one case (The Netherlands) this can occur only under peculiar circumstances; in another one (Italy) it occurs for a high role of the factions, and in the last one it occurs also for a low role of the factions. Overall, our results provide support for the suggested hypothesis.
Keywords: simulation; electoral systems; threshold proportionality; governability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 C15 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2009-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)
Downloads: (external link)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sAnafH-fcm93S8CeJ ... OBq/view?usp=sharing (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:uca:ucapdv:122
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in POLIS Working Papers from Institute of Public Policy and Public Choice - POLIS
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucia Padovani ().