Suchergebnisse

Multi‐member districts have rapidly disappeared from U.S. state legislatures. Two possible consequences of the change from multi‐member districts (MMD) to single‐member districts (SMD) are the reduction in the number of competitive races, and diminished voter turnout. This paper examines the impact of changing from multi‐member districts to single member districts on candidate emergence and voter participation in Florida and South Carolina. In Florida, but not South Carolina, contestation was generally more extensive in MMDs than SMDs. Counties which had higher percentages of contested legislative seats, particularly during the MMD period, had higher levels of overall turnout than did counties in which a smaller proportion of seats was contested. With the adoption of SMDs, legislative contestation is less related to voter turnout, confirming the hypothesis that electoral structures which afford voters multiple opportunities to choose candidates also encourage participation.

Differences in the number of seats that similar vote shares can deliver make some votes more marginal than others. In multi-member district systems, high-marginal-return votes are very volatile and research has assumed that parties do not go after them. This paper rejects this assumption, introducing a theory of marginal vote seeking across multi-member districts. By leveraging a novel mathematical algorithm and a cross sectional data set, we find evidence that parties seek marginal votes in these systems despite their volatility. In the case of the poverty alleviation programs used here, their use to attempt to secure marginal votes overwhelms the program's poverty alleviation goals. Estimates suggest that a district's share of a program's budget can increase by as much as 8% simply because of this district's likelihood of delivering marginal votes. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

EXPLORES REASONS THAT CANDIDATES REPRESENTING THE SAME PARTY RECEIVE DIFFERENT NUMBERS OF VOTES IN MULTI-MEMBER ELECTORAL DIVISIONS, CITING RESULTS OF 1973 ELECTIONS FOR 14 NEW DISTRICT COUNCILS IN LANCASHIRE. ASSESSES UNUSED VOTES AND GROSS-VOTING AS SOURCES OF DIFFERENTIAL PARTY VOTES. FINDS APPLICATION OF "LOW POLITICIZATION" AND "HIGH POLITICIZATION" MODELS EXPLAINS MORE THAN POSITION ON BALLOT DOES.

Why is it that in multimember electoral divisions, candidates of the same party rarely receive the same number of votes? Such dispersion of party votes has two sources -- unused votes & cross voting, & these in turn occur for two reasons: (1) some voters vote for individuals rather than parties; dispersion here varies with the proportion of "individual" voters in the electorate, which itself is a reflection of the level of politicization of a community; & (2) party voters may have votes unused or cross vote by accident or through ignorance; but this in itself does not cause dispersion unless there is some nonrandom factor at work leading party voters to favor certain candidates. One such factor is the order of names on the ballot paper. The amount of dispersion will vary with the length of the ballot paper with a tendency for candidates whose names appear at the top of the ballot to be favored. The results of the 1973 local elections in Lancashire, England, illustrate & confirm these hypotheses. 2 Tables. AA.

http://www.truman.missouri.edu/ipp/publications/index.asp?ViewBy=Date ; American state legislatures provide considerable institutional variation for testing theories of legislative representation, and one such feature is the multi-member district system (MMD). Whereas the U.S. House and most American state legislatures use the single member district system (SMD) in which a single legislator represents one geographic district, several state legislatures still use a system in which more than one legislator is elected from the same district in the same election. Although there can be considerable variation in the rules for such MMDs, one structure common to many state legislatures is a situation in which multiplecandidates run against each other for two seats from one district, and the two receiving the most votes are elected. Clearly, the electoral game is quite different in a situation in which a candidate is likely to be running against not only members of other parties but also another candidate of the same party. The incentives inherent in such a system are quite different than those for a legislator in an SMD, and it likely that such incentives change legislative representation in a number of ways. ; Includes bibliographical references

Abstract
The question at hand is located at the intersection of EU law and national constitutional law, and aims to answer the following problem: namely, how to mitigate federal concerns in the context of infringement procedures and financial sanctions under art. 260 TFEU. This article approaches this question both from the perspective of the Commission and the Court of Justice, as well as from the vantage point of the central and regional governments involved. After analysing the composition of the financial sanctions, we cover the involvement of subnational entities in the infringements proceedings in six tiered Member States (Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK) and the relevant national provisions for the partition of financial sanctions. The conclusions pertain to both the central and regional level and the EU institutions concerned, adhering to the multi-level relationship subjacent to this article.