Interdependence Effects in Mixed-Superposition Electoral Systems: An Empirical Test on Women's Participation in Sub-national Elections

Abstract

Mixed-superposition electoral systems, while devoid of compensatory mechanisms interconnecting their proportional and non-proportional sections, may create effective linkages that exert some impact upon the behaviour of political parties. This article examines the resulting interdependence effects with respect to women's electoral participation and legislative representation. It is hypothesized that if political parties embrace the logic of ticket-balancing when forming their candidate lists in the proportional representation sections of elections, they become more willing to nominate female candidates in majoritarian districts, which creates an important interdependence effect that ultimately contributes to the increased levels of women's representation. This hypothesis is empirically tested on a sample of 139 sub-national elections held in Russia in 2003–2011, with some additional information derived from the results of 81 previously held elections. The statistical analysis confirms the presence of interdependence effects with respect to women's political participation. The principal contextual factor that intermediates the observed effects is political regime. It is shown that electoral authoritarianism mitigates the interdependence effects of mixed-superposition electoral systems.

Notes

1. In this analysis, I follow a well-established convention (Norris, 1997) by jointly referring to all non-proportional electoral systems, including but not limited to single-member plurality (first-past-the-post), multi-member plurality, two-round majority, and single non-transferable vote, as to majoritarian systems. I use the term “mixed electoral systems” rather than “mixed-member electoral systems” because the presence of the district (member) tier is embodied in the standard definition of the concept (Massicotte & Blais, 1999: 345).

2. With one exception to be mentioned below, upper-chamber elections are irrelevant to this study because they were invariably held by majoritarian systems.

3. The only exception was Sverdlovsk province, for which I employed the data from the previous election to the upper chamber of its legislature.

4. The logit transformation is defined as ln (x / (1-x)), where x is a proportion or a ratio.

5. The Laakso and Taagepera (1979) effective number of parties/candidates is a measure of electoral fragmentation. Unless otherwise stated, all numerical data reported in this study are compiled by the author from TsIK (2003–2013).