About this ebook
comparative study of electoral systems is undergoing a lively revival. In the
past five years, over a dozen books on electoral systems have been written by
scholars from many nations and from many disciplines (see reviews of a number
of these in Lijphart, Political geography, long moribund, is undergoing a
remarkable renaissance (see reviews in Grofman, Taylor, Gudgin, and Johnston,
this volume). Social choice theorists have begun to link axiomatic criteria for
representative systems to practical political issues in choosing an election
system (see especially Brams and Fishburn, Fishburn, this volume). In the
United States, sparked in large part by the efforts of the section on
Representation and Electoral Systems of the American Political Science
Association, the history of American electoral experimentation with
proportional representation, weighted voting, and limited voting is being
rediscovered (see Grofman Weaver, this volume).
This
renewed scholarly attention to the study of electoral systems is long overdue.
The late Stein Rokkan wrote as recently as 1968, "Given the crucial
importance of the organization of legitimate elections in the development of
the mass democracies of the twentieth century, it is indeed astounding to
discover how little serious effort has been invested in the comparative study
of the wealth of information available” (Rokkan, 1968, 17). The long past
neglect of electoral systems by social scientists is especially surprising
since election rules not only have important effects on other elements of the
political system, especially the party system, but also offer a practical
instrument for political engineers who want to make changes in the political
system. Indeed, Sartori aptly characterizes electoral systems as ”the most
specific manipulative instrument of politics” 273)
“A useful
volume on the impact of electoral laws...includes a very good bibliography and
index...establishes a broader international and interdisciplinary perspective
on the methods of representation.”--‘American Political Science Review’
About the author
The editor, Bernard Grofman, is an authority on American politics, comparative election systems, and social choice theory. He has served as an expert witness or court-appointed consultant in state legislative and congressional lawsuits in 11 states. Grofman has been a Professor of Political Science at the University of California–Irvine since 1980. He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, visiting professor at the University of Michigan and at the University of Washington, and guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, and at a number of universities outside the U.S. His past research has dealt with mathematical models of group decision making, legislative representation, electoral rules, and redistricting. He has also been involved in modeling individual and group information processing and decision heuristics, and he has written on the intersection of law and social science, especially the role of expert witness testimony and the uses of statistical evidence. Currently he is working on comparative politics and political economy. He is co-author of two books published by Cambridge University Press and co-editor of 15 other books; he has published over 200 research articles and book chapters. Professor Grofman is a past president of the Public Choice Society. He is a co-recipient (with Chandler Davidson) of the Richard Fenno Prize of the Legislative Studies Section of the American Political Science Association for best book published in 1994 in the field of legislative studies (Quiet Revolution In The South) and is a Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Arend Lijphart, co-editor, is Research Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. His field of specialization is comparative politics, with a special focus on relationships between election rules and party systems, the prospects of democracy in ethnically divided countries, and different forms of democracy — especially the contrast between majoritarian and consensus democracy — and their strengths and weaknesses. His best-known books are The Politics of Accommodation (University of California Press, 1968), Democracy in Plural Societies (Yale University Press, 1977), Democracies (Yale University Press, 1984), Power-Sharing in South Africa (Institute of International Studies, Berkeley, 1985), Electoral Systems and Party Systems (Oxford University Press, 1994), and Patterns of Democracy (Yale University Press, 1999). His edited and co-edited books include Choosing an Electoral System (Praeger, 1984), Electoral Laws and Their Political Consequences (Agathon Press, 1986), and Parliamentary Versus Presidential Government (Oxford University Press, 1992). He has also published numerous articles in leading journals on comparative politics and democratic theory.
