The Politics of Electoral Systems

Abstract Electoral systems are the central political institution in representative democracies. They convert votes into seats and structure the choices facing voters. They also affect the behaviour of political parties, individual MPs, and candidates. This book looks at three kinds of issues. First, it focuses on the ‘political science of electoral systems’, that is, it joins the canon of works that have attempted to explore various relationships between electoral systems on the one hand and ‘outputs’ such as government formation, the behaviour of political actors, the representativeness of parliaments, and the quality of governance. Second, while quite a lot is known about generic families of electoral…