This article draws several conclusions. First, that elections provide critical information for shaping behavior, since in the second and third rounds, party elites and voters behaved in ways that were rational considering the outcome of the previous election. Second, on the whole, states have adopted a variety of systems and rarely changed them in major ways after the second round of elections, indicating that electoral systems quickly become constraining institutions. Where they have been changed, movement has been away from the extremes of either high disproportionality or proportionality. Third, results from the first three rounds of elections indicate declines in party system fragmentation, disproportionality, volatility, and wasted votes, indicating a growth in strategic voting. Finally, except in the very important case of party volatility, and Russia, the view that there is a generalized gap between the post-Soviet cases and the East European cases is not supported by the evidence.
Unless otherwise noted, the states included in this study are those eighteen countries that have held at least three rounds of elections. Those states are Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine. First-round elections are those in which multiple political parties could legally compete, except for Bosnia and Herzegovina and Georgia, where the 1996 and 1992 elections, respectively, are used as the first round.
2.
Information on the post-communist elections, including electoral method, effective parties, disproportionality, and wasted votes, can be found in the appendix.
3.
The differential impact of these formulae on election outcome is demonstrated in Appendix A in Lijphart (1994).
4.
For example, in a ten-member district, each seat in theory is worth 10 percent of the vote, so a small party has a good chance at winning at least one seat. In a three-member district, each seat is worth about 33 percent of the vote. The debate over district magnitude was crucial in Spain’s transition as conservative and rural supporters of the Francoist regime agreed to disband the Cortes and institute a new system with PR in return for electoral laws that set the district magnitude very low (Gunther 1989; Wiarda 1993).
5.
Hare is the most proportional of the PR formulae (used in Bosnia and Lithuania), followed by modified Sainte Laguë, Droop and Hagenbach-Bischoff (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Czech Republic, Georgia, Latvia, Poland, Russia, and Slovakia), while eight from the beginning put in place a system that was less proportional, notably Imperiali and d’Hondt (Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Moldova, Romania, Slovenia, and Yugoslavia). Some states used one formula to allocate seats at the local level and another for the national level: categorization is made using national-level formulae. The specific impact of each of these electoral systems on proportionality is demonstrated in Lijphart (1994, Appendix A).
6.
The Czech Parliament passed a bill to increase the number of electoral districts from eight to thirty-five. However, since the Czech Constitution states that Parliament will be elected by PR, in January 2001 the Czech Constitutional Court struck down this considerable increase in electoral districts, reasoning that it went too far in introducing majoritarian elements into the electoral system.
7.
The effective number of electoral parties is based on parties’ vote shares and is calculated by Laakso and Taagepera (1979) as Nv = 1/Σvi2. The effective number of parliamentary parties is calculated as Ns = 1/Σsi2.
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