Electoral systems and the personal vote

Jorge M. Fernandes, Yael Shomer and Matthew S. Shugart

Chapter 9 in Handbook of Comparative Political Institutions, 2024, pp 135-151 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Personalization is a cornerstone of representation. Most electoral systems in the world have a personal vote dimension, which makes understanding the causes of consequences of the personal vote ever more critical. In this chapter, we review the comparative work spawning from Carey and Shugart’s oft-cited work on the incentives for the personal vote. We review the politics of the personal vote in four parts. First, we discuss the intellectual roots and the conceptual foundations of the personal vote. Second, we discuss the empirical indicators most commonly used to measure it. Subsequently, we review the literature on how the personal vote affects legislative behaviour, emphasizing legislators’ reselection and re-election goals. Fourth, we examine how personal vote impacts descriptive representation and how legislators’ attributes matter. Fifth, we turn to the consequences of personal vote-seeking for public policies. The chapter concludes with a section on future research directions.

Keywords: Politics; and; Public; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781803929095.00017 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

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:elg:eechap:21846_9

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().