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Electoral Rules, Social Structure, and Public Goods Provision: Outcomes, Spending, and Policies

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Abstract

Does proportional representation (PR) lead to broader public goods spending? Past literature has overwhelming shown that it does, but the empirics underlying these findings have mostly relied on ethnically homogenous Western countries. Categorizing countries along three dimensions of ethnic structure—ethnic fractionalization, ethno-income crosscuttingness and ethno-geographic dispersion—I argue that in some types of societies, PR has the positive effect on fiscal spending type predicted by past models, but not in others. Specifically, in countries with high ethnic salience (ethnically heterogeneous, low crosscutting) where ethnic groups are geographically intermixed, PR leads to narrower fiscal spending; in high ethnic salience societies where ethnic groups are geographically isolated, neither PR nor majoritarian electoral rules lead to broader fiscal spending. I test this socio-institutional theory in a sample of 70 developing democracies using life expectancy and illiteracy as proxies for public goods provision.

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Notes

  1. Following Persson and Tabellini (2004), I use the term “public goods” to refer to government-provided goods or services that benefit large groups in the population as opposed to those targeted toward narrow subsections of society.

  2. His analysis on social expenditure (his main measure of public goods provision) contains just 22 countries in single-year, cross-national regressions. In the 1999 edition of Patterns of Democracy (1999), the models on social welfare contained just 15–18 countries.

  3. For example, vote-seat proportionality, incentives to cultivate a personal vote, or size of the selectorate.

  4. As Clark and Golder thus posit, empirical tests that fail to specify an interaction between electoral rules and social heterogeneity, “make inferential errors, and do not calculate desired quantities of interest.”

  5. Jusko (2015) considers (theoretically) how electoral rules affect redistribution differently when the poor are concentrated in urban areas versus spread across urban and rural.

  6. Others have studied how electoral rules and social structure interact to affect the number of political parties (Clark and Golder 2006, Lublin 2015), political violence (Selway and Templeman 2012), and women’s representation (Moser and Scheiner 2012).

  7. Lijphart’s regression on public social expenditures (Table 16.2), for example, contains just 22 OECD countries for a single year (2005), rather than the full 36 that includes countries from the Southern hemisphere.

  8. The exact formula is as follows: Q = (Community Size) / (# Seats Obtained + 1). The community with the highest quotient (Q) is assigned the seat.

  9. Author’s interviews with various party members, summer 2008.

  10. See Table E in the Supplementary Appendix

  11. Morselizing entails taking a broad policy and making “the means of producing and distributing these goods ... politically determined, [which] may not be the least costly means of providing these goods to the society” (Cox and McCubbins 2001, p.47–48).

  12. I use a measure of transfers as a percent of GDP (trans) from the KOF Index of Globalization. http://globalization.kof.ethz.ch/

  13. DPT is an immunization again diphtheria, pertussis (whopping cough), and tetanus.

  14. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator

  15. All independent variables are lagged by one year.

  16. All alternative estimation techniques and models are included in the Supplementary Appendix.

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  1. Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA

    Joel Sawat Selway

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Selway, J.S. Electoral Rules, Social Structure, and Public Goods Provision: Outcomes, Spending, and Policies. St Comp Int Dev 56, 384–411 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-021-09323-y

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