Winning More with Less

• In Event: Electoral Institutions, Candidate Strategy, and Legislative Behavior

Abstract

In our book project, Winning More with Less, we advance a novel theory of party competition in mixed-member majoritarian electoral systems, used in 28 countries around the world today. In this setting, voters cast two votes. We make the case that parties can win more seats by asking their supporters to cast their second vote for an allied party, and this strategy is more likely to be successful when parties control central government resources and can promise to deliver them to supporters who comply with their instructions. The theory yields novel insights into who benefits from geographically-targeted spending, why some countries have dominant parties, why dominant parties offer policies that are unpopular with the broader electorate, and how coalition partners with ideological differences govern together effectively. To make our case, we present an in-depth look at party competition in Japan, Mexico, Italy, South Korea, and Ukraine. We assemble large-scale data on voting behavior, government spending, and other demographic and fiscal features of the municipalities in each of these countries, and combine rigorous quantitative tests of our core hypotheses with insights yielded from interviews with political elites, newspaper reports, candidate manifestos, and party documents. In doing so, we contribute new ideas to comparative politics and shed new light on important features of the politics of these countries.

In this APSA presentation, we intend to present the core findings from the case of Italy, which forms one chapter of the book. Leveraging comprehensive new data on the universe of Italy’s 7,000+ municipalities during a period in which Members of the Chamber of Deputies were elected under MMM, we find that Forza Italia and its allies divvied up the single-seat districts between them, and instructed supporters to cast their first (district) vote for the candidate who was running and their second (proportional representation) vote for an allied party standing down. After the election, we find that Italian municipalities in which second votes decreased for the party fielding the candidate while increasing for the allies being stood down received significantly more government spending after elections.

Authors

• Amy Louise Catalinac, New York University

• Lucia Motolinia, Washington University in St Louis