Turnout and the (effective) number of parties at the national and district levels: A puzzle-solving approach

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Turnout and the (effective) number of parties at the national and district levels: A puzzle-solving approach

Selb, Peter - Personal Name; Grofman, Bernard - Personal Name;

Blais (2006) and Blais and Aarts (2006) in their review essays on voter turnout call attention to a striking puzzle about the link between electoral systems and turnout, namely that, ceteris paribus, proportional representation (PR) systems with many parties appear to have higher national-level turnout than single-member district (SMD) plurality systems with few parties, yet turnout does not increase with the (effective) number of parties (ENP) at the national level. To address this puzzle we turn to district-specific within-nation panel data from Switzerland and Spain. Our country-specific findings allow us to explain the national-level puzzle as essentially an ecological artefact, in that the multi-member districts found in proportional systems, on average, do exhibit higher turnout than SMDs, but turnout does not rise with district magnitude, m, once we move beyond the contrast between m = 1 and m > 1. Using a more sophisticated approach to measuring political competition that does not treat all PR systems as generating identical turnout incentives (Grofman and Selb, 2009), we seek to explain this puzzle by showing both empirically and theoretically that (1) proportionality does not necessarily increase with district magnitude, and (2) competition does not necessarily increase with district magnitude.

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Series Title: Party Politics
Call Number: -
Publisher: Thousand Oak : sage publisher., 2011
Collation: -
Language: English
ISBN/ISSN: 13540688
Classification: -
Content Type: -
Media Type: -
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Edition: Vol. 17 no. 1, January 2011.pp. 93-117
Subject(s): electoral systems
Turnout and the (effective) number of parties
Disproportionality
Distric magnitude
Effective number of parties
Voter tunout
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