I recently attended a talk by Dan Kselman about the relationship between electoral systems and corruption; a draft of the paper is available here. In the paper, Dan develops a model that includes the assumption that legislators in PR systems will identify a particular region within their district to target particular attention. There was a bit of a spirited discussion about the merits of that particular assumption, so I thought it might be interesting to throw the question out to the readers of the Monkey Cage. For those of you who have closely studied party competition in PR systems, does this sound like something you have observed in practice? Conversely, does this sound like something that does not happen in the country(ies) you have observed? Either way, please let us know in the comments section, especially if there are published works documenting either type of campaign strategies.
I also asked Dan to provide a brief synopsis of the argument for the readers of the Monkey Cage, and this is what he sent along:
The posted paper draft (not quite complete…) develops a game theoretic model to study legislators’ incentives to provide constituents in their electoral districts with particularistic goods and services (pork, social services, ombudsman services, etc). In single-member district systems, identifying the ‘target’ of such legislative particularism is fairly straight-forward: incumbents target such projects and services to residents of their single-member district.
In multi-member district systems, specifying theoretically the set of voters whom incumbents may target to receive particularistic goods and services is less straight-forward. For example, studies of clientelism in countries as varied as Brazil, Argentina, and Turkey have emphasized that clientelistic targeting requires ‘deep’ constituency relationships, and that incumbents have no way of maintaining such relationships with all voters in larger multi-member districts. As such, incumbents tend to maintain personal relationships in regional or municipal strongholds within larger electoral districts (aka bailiwicks). Similarly, research on Japanese politics suggests that incumbents often maintain personalistic relationships with particular professional subgroups within larger electoral districts.
On the other hand, one could also think of legislators in larger multi-member districts building a bridge which pleases all voters in that district, and not simply those in a well-defined geographic or professional strongholds. So, the question is this: how do legislators in multi-member district systems choose the subset of district constituents to which they will target their particularistic efforts? In the attached paper, the assumption is that legislators can choose (or choose not…) to develop personalistic relationships with subsets of voters in multi-member districts. Does anyone have examples outside of those mentioned above where this type of ‘carving out’ occurs? Or, does anyone have examples of situations in which particularistic efforts are targeted to the entirety of voters in a multi-member district?
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I know of a master thesis in which the author points that around 37% of brazilian deputies trying reelecion did not targeted their porks in the regions where they get more votes.
Unfortunately it is in portuguese, but I can provide a link to the thesis anyway, if requested.
regards,
Manoel
I bilieve the study of Ames (about Brazil and cited in the paper) is not updated.
The master thesis is from 2008.
I have seen some evidence of vote-seeking by specific politicians in the Colombia system, specifically when it shifted to a national district (M=100) from a series of departmental-based districts in 1991 (but it can even be seen in the 1958-1990 period as well). The more traditionalistic politicians tended to still get the votes needed to win their seats from their home districts, even after they technically no longer had home districts. This was true until electoral reform in 2003 changed the strategic ability of old-style politicos to control their own electoral lists and therefore obtain votes from targeted parts of the country. I have some summary date on this in my Book Voting Amid Violence: Electoral Democracy in Colombia. The book also has a discussion of candidate/party strategies along these lines. I also wrote a paper on the subject for a Public Choice society meeting some years ago.
There is also an article co-authored by Brian Crisp which looks at the way Colombian legislators (I think Senators) used travel funds provided by Congress to return to their home bases (even though they were elected in one national district). I forget where it was published.
Certainly, Colombia fits as a case with long-term clientelism and particularistic politics. The electoral system that was in place until the 2003 reforms was one that used the Hare quota with largest remainders and no strictures on the number of electoral lists a given party could offer. As a result, almost all winner in the 1991-2002 period in the Senate one via remainder, rather than quota.
If any of this is of interest, I can provide more detailed citations and information. In general, I think that Colombia could provide data for the study.
I can’t claim to have “closely studied” the case, but when I attended a meeting of the Irish constitutional reform committee recently http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2010/0203/1224263657582.html , I distinctly recall one of the TDs/MPs asserting (possibly cabinet minister Noel Dempsey) that their MMD system was de facto SMD because each representative had their own geographical support base. Nobody seemed to disagree with this.
Hi Manoel,
Could you please provide the mentioned link?
Abraço,
Antonio Pedro.
Do you believe in Ames study?
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