Making Votes Count
Strategic Coordination in the World's Electoral Systems

This book investigates strategic coordination in elections worldwide.

Gary W. Cox (Author)

9780521585163, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 March 1997

360 pages, 12 b/w illus. 16 tables
23.5 x 16 x 2.8 cm, 0.621 kg

"This book is a unique contribution to the fields of comparative politics and formal political theory. It offers a model integrating many diverse aspects of electoral competition that together bring into existence systems of national poltical parties. Gary Cox combines social choice theory, public choice theory, spatial theory, and the institutional approach to electoral studies to reach a new level of understanding of political competition in democracies. Gary Cox's new book is not only a theoretical study, but also a useful reference on comparative electoral institutions. ...the suthor also draws attention to such often overlooked institutions as rules of candidate nomination and party registration." Olga Shvetsova, Political Science Quarterly

Popular elections are at the heart of representative democracy. Thus, understanding the laws and practices that govern such elections is essential to understanding modern democracy. In this book, Cox views electoral laws as posing a variety of coordination problems that political forces must solve. Coordination problems - and with them the necessity of negotiating withdrawals, strategic voting, and other species of strategic coordination - arise in all electoral systems. This book employs a unified game-theoretic model to study strategic coordination worldwide and that relies primarily on constituency-level rather than national aggregate data in testing theoretical propositions about the effects of electoral laws. This book also considers not just what happens when political forces succeed in solving the coordination problems inherent in the electoral system they face but also what happens when they fail.

List of tables and figures
Series editor's preface
Preface
PART I. INTRODUCTION: 1. Introduction
2. Duverger's propositions
PART II. STRATEGIC VOTING: 3. On electoral systems
4. Strategic voting in single-member single-ballot systems
5. Strategic voting in multimember districts
6. Strategic voting in single-member dual-ballot systems
7. Some concluding comments on strategic voting, PART III. STRATEGIC ENTRY: 8. Strategic voting, party labels and entry
9. Rational entry and the conservation of disproportionality: evidence from Japan
PART IV. ELECTORAL COORDINATION AT THe SYSTEM LEVEL: 10. Putting the constituencies together
11. Electoral institutions, cleavage structures and the number of parties
PART V. COORDINATION FAILURES AND THE DEMOCRATIC PERFORMANCE: 12. Coordination failures and representation
13. Coordination failures and dominant parties
14. Coordination failures and realignments
PART VI. CONCLUSION
15. Conclusion
Appendices
References
Subject index
Author index.

Subject Areas: Political economy [KCP]