Electoral Systems and Governance

How Diversity Can Improve Policy-Making

Salomon Orellana

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415706087
• eBook ISBN: 9781317749141
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Diversity and dissent have been shown to improve decision-making in small groups. This understanding can be extended to the political arena and in turn it can enlighten ideas about policy-making.

This book focuses on the relationship between electoral institutions and policy outcomes in order to effectively explore the impact of diversity and dissent on the political arena. In doing so, it provides an empirical assessment of three key areas:

• the diversity of political information.
• policy innovation.
• pandering.

Drawing on economics, psychology, organization theory, and computer science, this innovative volume makes an important contribution to scholarship on the impact of electoral systems and the democratic nature of governments.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of governance, electoral systems, representation, comparative politics, public policy, democratic government and political theory.

4 How electoral systems can influence policy innovation

DOI: 10.4324/9781315795973-4

As we have seen, electoral institutions can influence the political information environment, especially by influencing the diversity of perspectives included in the policy-making process. This chapter explores how this diversity affects governance, by focusing on the first mechanism discussed in Chapter 2: that diversity can enhance policy innovation. As discussed, this mechanism is based on the small-group finding that diversity is beneficial to decision-making because it enhances creativity and innovation. While the small-group dynamics do not perfectly translate over to the political arena, we can profitably search for instances in which electoral institutions affect policy innovation—i.e., influence how early countries are able to adopt certain policies.

Indeed, because electoral institutions profoundly influence the diversity of political discourse, they can influence how promptly societies will debate certain ideas, and consequently, how quickly societies will respond to those ideas. This dynamic should be especially relevant to sensitive issues and ideas that are often difficult for societies to confront. Many of these sensitive ideas will be neglected by the major parties, either because these parties find those ideas objectionable or because they find them too risky to address, even when they agree with them. As we saw in Chapter 3, however, minor parties in more permissive electoral systems (i.e., under proportional representation) have more space to introduce controversial or sensitive ideas into the political discourse. Consequently, public preferences in proportional/multiparty systems should tend to change more quickly regarding those ideas, and governments in these systems should tend to adopt relevant policies more quickly.

In this chapter I look for evidence of these dynamics by focusing on issues that in recent decades appear to be undergoing the transition from sensitive to ordinary, particularly in developed and rapidly developing countries. Namely, as documented by a large modernization literature, support has been growing for “post-materialist” ideas such as gender equality, homosexuality, divorce, euthanasia, and environmental protection. I first use data from the WVS (World Values Survey Association 2009) to show that countries with proportional/multiparty systems tend to (1) be more tolerant on issues such as homosexuality, divorce, and euthanasia; and (2) tend to experience more rapid changes in attitudes on those issues. Taken together, these results suggest that cultural evolution unfolds more rapidly in proportional/multiparty systems. I then use cross-national data on civil union legislation to show that these dynamics help explain patterns in policy innovation on such issues, particularly by focusing on how rapidly countries adopted policies favorable to same-sex couples. We will see that in recent decades, countries with proportional/multiparty systems adopted either civil union legislation or gay marriage sooner than countries with less proportional/fewer-party systems.

I also look for the effects of innovation in the areas of prejudice, defined by Fishbein (2002) as an unreasonable negative attitude towards others because of their membership in a particular group, and of discrimination as harmful actions toward others because of their membership in a particular group. I am guided by the idea that humans are prejudiced by default, but that various factors mitigate prejudice. Here, I expect that the information dynamics discussed in this book influence prejudice. As suggested by Allport (1979: 261–80), prejudice may be reduced by contact between majority and minority groups, especially in a context where minority groups are given equal status. Proportional/multiparty systems are more likely to produce such a context, since they make it easier for minorities and women to become representatives than do less proportional/fewer-party systems. Thus, citizens in proportional/multiparty systems should be exposed to images of minority leaders and to their ideas more frequently than citizens in less-proportional/fewer-party systems. In the long term, these dynamics should produce noticeable differences in prejudice across these different systems. I use data from the WVS to show that citizens in proportional/multiparty systems do tend to show more tolerance towards minorities/out-groups than do citizens in less proportional/fewe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Theory: electoral institutions, diversity, and policy problem solving
• Electoral systems, party systems, and political information
• How electoral systems can influence policy innovation
• Electoral institutions and pandering
• Electoral institutions and elite extraction
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index