Making votes count: strategic coordination in the world's electoral systems

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 is the first book that 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 is also the first book that 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. Winner of the Wilson Prize for the best book in political science published in 1997, the Luebbart Prize awarded to the best book in comparative politics, and the prize from the American Political Science association for the best book in political economy.

In Cambridge core.

Introduction -- Duverger's propositions -- On electoral systems -- Strategic voting in single-member single-ballot systems -- Strategic voting in multimember districts -- Strategic voting in single-member dual-ballot systems -- Some concluding comments on strategic voting -- Strategic voting, party labels, and entry -- Rational entry and the conservation of disproportionality : evidence from Japan -- Putting the constituencies together -- Electoral institutions, cleavage structures, and the number of parties -- Coordination failures and representation -- Coordination failures and dominant parties -- Coordination failures and realignments -- Conclusion.