I imagine everyone in Italy is tired of electoral reform efforts at the national level, at least for the moment. Here, however, in an interesting example of cross-level diffusion, the Tuscan electoral law is being changed again.
The electoral law of 2004 had a majority bonus, and differing electoral thresholds for electoral lists depending on the success of each list’s candidate for the presidency of the region. Ironically, the law was cited by the centre-right government when it embarked upon the reform of 2005 — citing a reform of a very centre-left region was good cover for the reform.
Now the major parties, plus some hangers-on — Pd, Fi-Pdl, An-Pdl, Alleanza Federalista and Partito Socialista — have decided that they’ll capitalize upon the reduction of party system fragmentation at national level, and increase the thresholds further. The threshold for those who run alone (or without a successful candidate for regional president) increases from 1,5% to 5%, and there’s a 4% threshold for all other parties.
Somewhere there’s a really nice paper to be written on the cross-level diffusion of electoral systems. It would require collecting a mountain of data however…
I must say that while I agree that Italy needs to have less fragmentations in its coalitions raising thresholds is failry drastic. There is something to say for the Australian system of preferential voting.
Link | July 31st, 2009 at 2:46 pm
I think if I were to adopt one system from Australia, it would be the system used in the Senate — not the Alternative Vote, which in many cases creates very disproportional electoral results.
In any case, one of these thresholds — the 4% threshold — isn’t that much higher than the effective threshold, or the number of votes needed to win a seat based just on the number of seats and the district magnitude. Here, there’s just one district, with 55 seats, so the effective threshold is 100/55, or a little under 2%. Going from 2% to 4% (5% for some) makes a difference, sure, but it’s hard to say that it’s anti-democratic. It’s not Turkey, with its 10% threshold.
The best way of reducing fragmentation without imposing an explicit threshold might be to have small (4 to 7 seat) districts. According to one paper — http://web.mit.edu/polisci/research/wip/Carey_Hix_Jan_2009.pdf — that’s where the electoral ‘sweet spot’ lies…
Link | August 1st, 2009 at 6:49 pm