Essays on electoral institutions

Do electoral systems matter for the outcomes of democratic politics beyond their well-known relationship to party systems? This thesis presents three studies on the consequences of electoral institutions, highlighting how they shape incentives and opportunities for political actors operating at the intra-party level. The first article considers how the spatial representativeness of legislatures - i.e. the extent to which MPs from different parts of the country are equally represented - varies with constituency and ballot structure. The paper proposes a novel measurement to gauge the descriptive representation of places in parliaments and develops a theoretical framework linking spatial representation to parties' incentives and voters' ability to elect local MPs. Consistently with the theory, the analysis finds that mixed-member systems and preferential voting mechanisms are associated with more geographically representative parliaments. The second paper asks whether sub-national legislators' likelihood to run for the national parliament is influenced by the electoral system through which they were elected. Leveraging within-legislature variation in electoral rules across German State parliaments, I find that list-PR MPs are more likely to attempt ‘level hopping’ than single-member district legislators. It is argued that this depends on the lower levels of electoral security of the former, and to the more direct accountability of the latter to local (s)electorates. The third paper develops a theoretical model of preference vote distribution in preferential-list PR system, extending the approach behind Taagepera and Shugart's Seat Product Model to intra-party competition. I show that the share of preference votes for the first-ranked and last-eligible candidates, as well as the effective number of candidates in a list, can be accurately predicted in expectation as functions of institutional variables. Overall, the thesis makes contributions in terms of measurement, data and theory towards a broader and richer understanding of the intra-party effects of electoral institutions