Constitutional Design and Citizen Electoral Control

TLDR

Empirical theories of electoral and legislative politics are used to formulate propositions about how constitutional designs affect citizen electoral control, and prior work suggests that different models of citizen control require distinct combinations of responsibility clarity, party choice opportunity, election decisiveness, and effective policy representation. This article reports preliminary tests of these propositions. The study compares constitutional arrangements across 16 democracies with measures of responsibility clarity, party choice opportunity, election decisiveness, and effective representation before and after elections. The preliminary analysis indicates that majoritarian election laws and legislative dominance create conditions favorable to Government Accountability and, to a lesser extent, Government Mandate models, but are ineffective for the Representative Delegate model, whereas consensual constitutional designs succeed mainly in fostering the Representative Delegate model. Further research is required to confirm these findings.

Abstract

Empirical theories of electoral and legislative politics can be used to build propositions about the consequences of constitutional designs for citizen electroal control. This article reports preliminary tests of such propositions. Constitutional arrangements in 16 democracies are compared to the degree of clarity of responsibility, opportunity for party choice, decisiveness of elections and effective representation in policy-making, before and after elections. Previous work had suggested that different models of citizen control require different combinations of these characteristics. The preliminary analysis shows constitutional designs that emphasized majoritarian election laws and government dominance in the legislature generally succeeded in creating conditions for the Government Accountability and, to a lesser degree, Government Mandate models of citizen control, but did poorly in creating conditions for the Representative Delegate model. The consensual constitutional designs were generally successful only in creating conditions for the Representative Delegate model. However, much additional work remains.