Electoral reform and the mirror image of inter-party and intra-party competition: The adoption of party lists in Colombia

Electoral Studies 29 (2010) 648–660

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Electoral reform and the mirror image of inter-party and intra-party competition: The adoption of party lists in Colombia Mónica Pachón b, Matthew S. Shugart a, * a b

Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0510, USA Department of Political Science, Universidad de los Andes, Carrera 1 No 18A 10, Bogotá, Colombia

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 16 September 2009 Received in revised form 6 April 2010 Accepted 29 June 2010

The Colombian case offers a rare opportunity to observe effects of electoral reform where districting remains constant. Only the formula changed, from extremely ‘personalized’ (seats allocated solely on candidate votes) to ‘listized’: seats are allocated to party lists, which may be either open or closed. Electoral reform has effects on both the inter-party dimension (the number of parties competing) and the intra-party dimension (the extent of competition within parties). Consistent with theoretical expectations, the inter-party dimension features an increased number of parties in the low-magnitude districts and a decrease in the high-magnitude districts. On the intra-party dimension, the impact “mirrors” the inter-party: less competition in smaller districts, yet more in larger districts. Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Electoral reform Colombia SNTV Proportional representation Preference vote Party lists Open lists Closed lists Logical model

1. Introduction In recent decades, numerous democracies have reformed their electoral systems. Typically, reforms entail revamping districting arrangements, often adding a second tier of seat allocation.i Far rarer are reforms that fundamentally change the seat allocation formula, but maintain the same districts as the pre-reform system. Using one of these rare cases, Colombia 2002–2006, we undertake an analysis of the effect of reform. Colombia’s reform altered the “incentive to cultivate a personal vote” (Carey and Shugart, 1995) by replacing a system that was essentially the single non-transferable vote (SNTV) with party-list proportional representation (PR). District boundaries were unchanged, as were their

* Corresponding author. Tel.: þ1 858 534 5016; fax: þ1 858 534 7130. E-mail address: [email protected] (M.S. Shugart). i For example, the “mixed-member” systems of Japan, New Zealand, and Venezuela. 0261-3794/$ – see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2010.06.005

magnitudes (number of seats, denoted M). The critical change is that now a party wins seats based on the collective votes earned by its list. Prior to the reform, collective party-vote shares were irrelevant to the allocation: the system awarded seats to the top-M vote-winning candidates, regardless of party. Because of this feature, we refer to the pre-reform system as personalized. The post-reform system allocates seats to party lists before taking individual candidates into account, so we describe the reform as listization. In theorizing about the impact of listization, and exploring effects empirically, we are interested in the outcomes for both the number of partiesdthe “inter-party dimension”dand within-party competitiondthe “intra-party dimension.” We argue that these two dimensions are systematically related, because moving from a personalized to a listized electoral system provides a fundamentally different calculus for individual politicians and parties. Put simply, when collective vote totals matter, the incentive to cultivate a party vote dominates over the incentive to cultivate a personal vote. This is

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a complete reversal from the priorities given by the prereform system, where personal vote incentives dominated. Further, we argue that this dominance of party-based incentives holds even where lists are “open” (i.e. voters cast votes for a specific candidate on a list). Our analysis of both the inter-party and intra-party effects of electoral reform in Colombia is driven by this fundamental reorientation of institutional incentives. We now offer an overview of our main findings, on each dimension of competition. Regarding the inter-party dimension, our main finding is that listization results in a decrease in the number of competing parties in larger districts, but an increase in lowmagnitude districts. The impact at larger-magnitude districts is a straightforward product of the incentive of candidates from minor parties to aggregate onto larger party lists due to the new system’s awarding of seats based on collective partisan performance. At lower magnitudes, on the other hand, the personalization of the former system had implied that candidates could compete under the same party label without their votes helping elect a rival. With listization, this tactic is no longer feasible, precisely due to the aggregating of votes to party lists. Thus listization in high-magnitude districts results in mergers of smaller parties into fewer but larger parties; in low-magnitude districts it results in splits of formerly dominant parties. Both of these results are driven by the fundamental change in the incentive to cultivate a personal vote: in the old system, a candidate’s personal vote was the only criterion in winning a seat, but in the new system the first criterion is collective party votes. Another aspect of Colombia’s reform allows us yet more leverage over the question of the impact of listization. Uniquely, as far as we know, Colombia’s new PR system permits parties the option of presenting either a “closed” or an “open” party list. When a list is closed, individual candidates’ order of election depends on their partyprovided ranks. When the list is open, ranks depend on the number of “preference votes” cast for specific candidates. This party option allows us to challenge conventional wisdom regarding the impact of electoral systems on the incentive to cultivate a personal or party reputation (Carey and Shugart, 1995; Ames, 1995; Chang and Golden, 2007). Open-list proportional representation is typically seen as highly personalized, akin to SNTV, in contrast to the most highly “party-centered” of all systems, closed list proportional representation. In contrast, we find that the more fundamental distinction is between personalized and listized systems. We will show–surprisingly if we go by conventional wisdom–that it was the most personalized elements of Colombia’s party system that opted for closed lists: (1) local politicians seeking to differentiate themselves from a formerly dominant party in small-magnitude districts, and (2) national political figures seeking to use their own personal reputations to carry their new parties into office. By contrast, most candidates in 2006 ran on open lists, particularly in the largest-magnitude districts. It is precisely when district magnitude is high that scholars of personal vote incentives (Carey and Shugart, 1995) suggest that intra-list competition among large numbers of candidates undermines party-based incentives. Yet the evidence

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we present below suggests that, far from being an obstacle to party-building, open lists may have been essential to it, by giving disparate political forces the incentive to aggregate onto lists competing against other lists. Moreover, we present evidence that shows that in small districts, intra-party competition was reduced by the reform compared to the personalized pre-reform system.ii Yet the reform led to substantially greater intra-party competition in large districts than was observed prereform. This again challenges Carey and Shugart’s (1995) claim that greater incentive to cultivate a personal vote is driven by intra-party competition. Instead, we suggest that it may be necessary to de-couple these concepts, and that a more personalized system of seat allocation (e.g. SNTV) does not necessarily imply greater intra-party competition. Taken together, these findings tell us that the interparty and intra-party dimensions “mirror” each other. In the transition from personalized to listized allocation, where competition increases on one dimension, it tends to decrease on the other. At higher magnitudes, interparty competition is reduced (fewer competing parties), but it is precisely in these districts where intra-party competition is increased after reform. The opposite pattern prevails in smaller districts. Now, before turning to a fuller development of the logic by which the reform produces these effects, and our empirical analysis, we offer a brief introduction to the country case and its electoral systems.

2. Colombia’s electoral systems Despite the country’s high level of violence, Colombia has been a functioning electoral democracy for over fifty years (Welna and Gallon, 2007). At one time, the country’s politics was dominated by two traditional parties, Liberal and Conservative, which shared legislative and alternated executive power under the National Front (1958–1974; see Hartlyn, 1988). After the end of the Front, and especially under a new constitution after 1991, the traditional parties’ dominance rapidly broke down (Taylor, 2008). Colombia’s congress consists of a House of Representatives, elected in 33 districts with magnitude (M) ranging from 2 to 18 (mean 4.8, median 4), and a Senate elected in a single national district, with M ¼ 100.iii The wide crossdistrict and cross-chamber variation in district magnitude, but with no magnitude change across elections, offers substantial theoretical leverage on the impact of listization on electoral coordination. The seat allocation formula, in use for decades prior to 2006, was simple quota and largest remainders (SQLR). This formula is a standard PR formula (Lijphart, 1994; Taagepera, 2007) when applied to party lists. However, in Colombia, it was applied to personal lists. Typically a party,

ii As we explain in Section 6, the lowest intra-party competition means an absence of at least one losing candidate who was close to beating the party’s last winner (in OLPR or SNTV), or else a closed list. iii There are also special national districts (for Afro-Colombians in the Senate and for indigenous in the House), excluded from our analysis.

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especially a large one, would have numerous candidates competing on separate personal lists bearing its party label. It was this personalization of the lists that rendered it equivalent to the single non-transferable vote, or SNTV (Cox and Shugart, 1995; Taylor, 2008: 85, 110 ff). Under SQLR, a simple (Hare) quota (votes divided by magnitude) was sufficient to ensure a seat. Seats unfilled after allocation by quotas were filled by remaindersdfor each list, the original votes, minus quotas useddone per list in descending order, until all seats were filled. In Colombia it had become rare by 2002 for any of the myriad personal lists to win more than one seat. The result was that each list, regardless of party label, served as the vehicle for the campaign of just one candidate. When no list wins sufficient votes for more than one seat, allocation via SQLR is exactly the same as if it were SNTV: each of the M largest lists wins a seat. This was the case for all House seats in 2002,iv and thus we can treat that election as SNTV.v The picture in the Senate was only slightly different: in each election from 1994 to 2002, 100 seats were filled by 97 lists. We will use the case of the district of Bogotá (M ¼ 18) to illustrate how the pre-reform system promoted personalization. In 2002 there were 286 lists registered, half of which bore the Liberal label. Thirty lists, including eight Liberal, won at least 1% of the vote. Each of the eighteen legislators was elected on his or her own list; i.e. the winners were the candidates at the top of the lists that had the eighteen highest vote totals. Of these eighteen winners, four were Liberals. The remaining fourteen seats were won by fourteen different parties. Of these one-seat parties, only two also had a losing list place as high as thirtieth in the districtvi; six of them presented exactly one list, not taking any chances on diluting their votes across separate competitors. Thus this example from Bogotá clearly shows both dimensions of competition. Some competitive candidates, particularly Liberals, were engaging in intra-party competition, likely seeking to maximize their odds of victory by differentiating themselves from candidates bearing the same party label. Others could be said to be engaging primarily in inter-party competition, because they were the unique (or only remotely competitive) candidate of their party; their best chances of victory perforce would be in defeating candidates bearing other party labels. In any case, each of these winners won on his or her own personal reputation: the top 18 candidates won–this is the de-facto SNTV feature–and it would not have mattered to the allocation process if these winners had represented 18 distinct political parties or 18 separate candidates competing within one party. Marking a major departure with previous practice, the post-reform formula is a strictly party-list system. Each party is limited to a single list per district, and seats are

allocated by D’Hondt divisors,vii favoring larger lists (Taagepera, 2007: 85–9) relative to SQLR. In the district of Bogotá in 2006, there were eight parties that won seats (down from fifteen in 2002), including three that won four each and two parties with two seats. The smallest vote total that earned a party a seat was 3.7%, a dramatic difference from 2002 when nine of the parties that won a seat did so on less than 3.5% and one had only 1.5%. Clearly, the new system created incentives to aggregate on to larger party lists in this large district. Now we consider some theoretical implications of listization. 3. Listization and the mirror of the inter-party and intra-party dimensions With the electoral reform, Colombia has had each of the three major multiseat district formulas: single non-transferable vote (SNTV), closed-list proportional representation (CLPR), and open-list proportional representation (OLPR). In fact, these three systems are logically connected in a way that is not typically recognized. The connection is through how they affect whether candidates tend to enter the race on a large party, where they will one of several viable candidates, or on their own party in which they will be the sole or dominant candidate. We develop this argument in this section, first comparing the formulas, and then considering the impact of district magnitude. 3.1. How the allocation formulas affect vote-seeking Listization changes the balance between personal and party reputation-seeking in the competition for seats. Under SNTV, personal vote strategies dominate, because it is a top-M system. Under party-list PR, on the other hand, personal votes affect candidates’ prospects only in the context of collective vote shares won by their parties. The SNTV rules allowed any aspirant for office to choose whether to run under the banner of an existing party or register a new one. Many parties (especially Liberal) followed “permissive” rules of endorsement, as seen in our example above from Bogotá, rarely denying candidates the right to use of their label. Likewise, the rules for forming a new party or electoral “movement” were permissive (Pizarro, 2001; Pachón, 2001). Thus it was relatively easy for a candidate to run either against other candidates in a larger party or to launch an entirely new party. Because the allocation rule did not take parties into account, choosing a party label was not about sharing, or pooling, votes with co-partisans. Instead we can assume that candidates selected the party label that they expected would maximize their own personal vote. The value of party affiliation had to come from something other than the electoral formula. For candidates in a large party and some well-established smaller parties the value of party affiliation would be the identification with a pool of voters who

iv

It had also been the case for all seats in 1998. These lists typically contained other candidates, and thus, unlike the one-candidate “lists” of a “normal” SNTV system, they potentially could earn more than one seat (Candidates other than the list-head could serve if an elected member resigned midterm.). vi The liberals had 4 more in the top 30, in addition to their 4 winners. v

vii A list’s votes are divided by a series of whole numbers (1, 2, 3,.) and seats are assigned to the resulting quotients until all are filled. The reform also introduced low legal thresholds: half a Hare quota in the House (which is much too small to have impact) and 2% in the Senate.

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themselves identify with the party. For others, party label was simply a way of branding a de-facto independent candidacy. Choosing the label of an established party with other viable candidates in the district is an intra-party strategy. This term signifies that the candidate competes with others bearing the same label. In order to maximize its collective seat total, the party would need a means to coordinate among its multiple aspirants to ensure that some number of candidates (greater than or equal to one) would finish in the top M. The need to coordinate in order for a party to ensure a collectively optimal distribution of its votes is a classic problem in SNTV.viii Other candidates enter the contest under a label with no other viable candidate in the district; we call this an inter-party strategy. The reason for this term is straightforward: such an entry decision increases by one the number of distinct party labels competing in the race for the district’s M seats, rather than increasing the number of candidates in a party with other viable candidates. The important point about the prereform SNTV system is that either strategy can be understood as a means for cultivating the candidate’s personal vote, because the only calculation that matters is how to maximize one’s chance of finishing with a top-M total. The calculation changes under party-list PR: in which party does the candidate have the greatest chance of election? If s is the number of seats a list wins, the answer depends on having a top-s preference–vote rank within an open list or a top-s party–given rank on a closed list. Unlike under SNTV, this calculation involves an estimate of collective impact: what matters first is what s will be, and only then (if at all) comes the question of the votes won by the candidate personally. 3.2. The effect of district magnitude on strategy, contingent on allocation formula District magnitude enters into the calculations just sketched because of the effects it has on the number of votes required to win a seat on personal votes alone, in a personalized system, or on the number of votes a list needs to win a certain number of seats, in a listized system. The literature on SNTV has separately addressed its tendencies to promote both intra-party and inter-party strategies. As already noted, there has been much emphasis on candidates’ competing for seats with co-partisans, giving rise to collective problems of coordination for party organizations. The literature has also noted the prevalence of inter-party strategies, which can lead to SNTV’s being “super-proportional” (Taagepera and Shugart, 1989: 170 n5, Cox, 1996 ix) because needing to coordinate across multiple candidates makes it difficult for larger parties to translate their votes into a given number of winnable seats. The small parties, by contrast, simply run one candidate (or take steps to ensure the bulk of their votes are concentrated on one). In the Bogotá example above, the last six winners had

viii

For an overview, see Grofman et al., 1999. For a different view, based on aspects of the Japanese case that are not relevant for our purposes, see Christensen and Johnson (1995). ix

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between 1.47% and 2.00% of the district vote and four of these were the sole or dominant candidates of their party. Meanwhile, Liberals only narrowly failed to elect two additional candidates whose vote percentage was greater than 1.25%. In other words, with a better coordination of votes, the Liberals, three of whose four winners had over 1.75% of the vote, might have elected at least six rather than just four. Because its coordination was sub-optimal, the Liberal Party displaced some seats to parties whose tiny vote shares were concentrated on one candidate. This is what is meant by the “superproportionality” of SNTV, and it implies a very steep slope when the number of competing parties is graphed against district magnitude–as we show below. In small-magnitude districts (2–4 seats), on the other hand, we expect intra-party strategies to dominate under SNTV. When district magnitude is small, only one or a few larger parties tend to be competitive. Thus aspirants are more likely to seek to tap into a pool of voters in the district that identify with one of these existing locally dominant parties (i.e. one that will have at least one other viable candidate). The logic we just sketched suggests that intra-party strategies dominate at low magnitude (few parties can win, with multiple candidates seeking to be the representatives of these parties), but that at high magnitudes, inter-party strategies dominate (many small parties may win seats, but most will have little intra-party competition because they are effectively one-candidate parties). What about the balance of strategies when the allocation has been listized, as in Colombia, 2006? We expect a mirror image of strategic adaptation. That is, inter-party strategies tend to replace intra-party strategies, and vice versa. Consider the logic for small magnitudes first, where we already stipulated that intra-party strategies dominate under SNTV. To understand the changed strategic incentives, we must consider the impact of the intra-party dimension on the inter-party. Because SNTV entails purely personalistic allocation, intra-party factions may coexist underneath the banner of the same party. Candidates representing different intra-party factions can have their cake and eat it, too: Align with a major party, perhaps signaling an ability to deliver clientelistic benefits from the central government, while simultaneously cultivating independent personal reputations. If a large party has at least two such politicians under its banner in a two-seat district, for example, it may win both seats, provided they have roughly equal personal appeal. However, coexistence is made more difficult after listization, because even if the list is open to intra-party competition, now a vote for any candidate pools to the list as a whole. Thus a vote for one candidate may help elect a rival candidate instead. This vote-pooling feature of lists generates incentives for rivals to differentiate themselves by using different labels, enhancing the value of inter-party strategies. Thus in small districts, previously dominant parties practicing intra-party vote-division can be expected to yield party splits, increasing the number of competing parties. At larger magnitudes, we expect the mirror of this adaptation. On the inter-party dimension, the number of

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parties in the largest districts is straightforward: party list allocation formulas (especially D’Hondt divisors) are less “permissive” than SNTV to the representation of small parties. Thus, following listization, the smallest parties have an incentive to merge their efforts into larger lists. Incumbents who may have been elected on distinct party labels, plus newcomers who might have tried the same strategy under SNTV, instead merge their efforts into a larger party more likely to pass the higher threshold for a list to gain even one seat. Examples from both a small and a large district demonstrate these strategic changes. The two-seat district of Chocó in 2002 was dominated by the Liberal party, three of whose candidates were closely competitive. In 2006, one of the incumbents won reelection under the banner of Cambio Radical on a closed list (which was not close to winning the second seat). The other seat was won by a candidate of the new party known as La U (described below), who dominated his open list with about ten times the preference votes of his listmate. The Liberals, presenting a closed list, finished a close third. Thus the district moved from 3-candidate competition (all of one party) to 3-party competition (but with no effective intra-party competition). Now consider Valle, M ¼ 13. In 2002, the United Popular Movement (MPU) and the Humbertistas each presented two candidates who earned similar vote totals; however, only one (from MPU) was elected. In 2006, these two parties combined on one list, under the MPU label, and with a very similar vote share to their aggregate votes of 2002, won two seats. The MPU incumbent, seeking reelection, contributed his personal vote to the list, though he was defeated, as was one of the repeat Humbertista candidates. Whereas in Chocó the main dimension of competition changed from intra-party to inter-party, in Valle it was the reverse. 3.3. Summarizing the expectations: the mirror image of competition Our theoretical expectation is that the two dimensions of competition are a “mirror” of one another following listization of formerly personalized seat allocation: in larger-magnitude districts, where parties merge and thereby reduce inter-party competition, they tend to become more competitive internally; however, in smaller districts where parties split and thus generate more interparty competition, they tend to become less competitive internally. Overall, changes on the intra-party dimension are potentially important for longer-range goals of the advocates of Colombia’s reform, as increased intra-party competition in large districts may dampen the much-criticized clientelism of Colombia’s fragmented party system (Pizarro, 2001; Santana, 1998). Nonetheless, one of our findings is a challenge to scholarly wisdom about intraparty competition. Contrary to expectations that closed lists generate more powerful incentives to cultivate collective party reputations than do open lists (Carey and Shugart, 1995), we will provide evidence that it is the most “personalized” parties in Colombia’s first party-list election that presented the closed lists.

In our empirical analysis, we explore changes, at the district level, in two primary outcome variables: the number of parties that earn votes, and the competitiveness of the intra-party dimension. Before turning to the districtlevel analysis, we offer a brief overview of the two elections, in order to situate the district-level contests from which our data come within their broader national political context.

4. Setting the scene: Colombia’s elections of 2002 and 2006 The March 2002, congressional election represented the nadir of electoral support for the two traditional parties. In May 2002, their decline was confirmed when Colombians elected their first independent president, Alvaro Uribe.x Table 1 shows aggregate results of the 2002 and 2006 House and Senate elections. Notably, Liberals retained a plurality in 2002, but only 31% of the vote; their support declined further in 2006. Many pro-Uribe candidates in 2002 sought congressional seats under new party labels, accelerating an ongoing proliferation of small parties (Moreno, 2005). By 2006, with Uribe-seeking reelection, the Liberal party split. The “official” Liberals had opposed Uribe in his first term while other Liberals joined his legislative coalition and contested the 2006 election under new banners. It is within the context of this new national cleavage over Uribe that electoral reform passed in 2003 as an effort by both traditional parties and the leftist opposition to enhance the value of party labels in legislative races (Shugart et al., 2007). The new party-list system thus made it untenable for both supporters and opponents of the president to coexist under a common label, because now a vote for any candidate on a given list pools overall its candidatesdin marked contrast to SNTV. Table 1 indicates that the most successful party in 2006 was the new Partido Social de Unidad Nacional, known popularly as Partido de la U (to signal its uribista stance). Its membership consists of many former Liberals. In addition to la U, two other parties in Uribe’s coalition also performed well: the Cambio Radical and the Conservatives. The Cambio Radical already existed in 2002, but gained new adherents among former Liberals and others prior to the 2006 election. The Conservative Party, one of Colombia’s oldest, regained some of its former strength in 2006, aided by the party-list system, which encouraged former splinters from within the conservative “family” (Pachón, 2001) to reunite under a common label.xi Another new party in 2006 was the Polo Democrático Alternativo, combining several small leftist opposition parties. The prevalence of inter-party strategies under SNTV is well displayed in the table’s “other” category. Each “other”

x He previously had been a Liberal, but did not seek that party’s endorsement. Instead, his supporters formed an electoral “movement,” Primero Colombia (Colombia First). xi We count as a separate “party” any list bearing a distinctive label, even if part of one of the traditional “families.” Other experts agree, e.g., Taylor (2008) and Crisp and Ingall (2001).

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Table 1 The 2002 and 2006 congressional elections in Colombia: national results. Party

Partido de La U Polo Democrático Alternativo Partido Colombia Democratica Colombia Viva Partido Liberal Colombiano Partido Conservador Colombiano Movimiento Nacional Movimiento Alas Equipo Colombia Movimiento Integracion Popular Movimiento Colombia Siempre Cambio Radical Convergencia Popular Cívica Movimiento Apertura Liberal Movimiento Integración Regional Movimiento de Salvación Nacional Others Total

Senate 2002

House of Representatives 2002

Senate 2006

House of Representatives 2006

Seats

% of votes

Seats

% of votes

Seats

% of votes

Seats

% of votes

– – – – 28 13 6 3 4 2 2 1 0 0 1 40 100

– – – – 30.6% 10.0% 4.8% 3.3% 3.0% 2.9% 2.5% 1.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.9% 40.9% 100.0%

– – – – 54 21 1 4 – 3 7 4 5 2 2 58 161

– – – – 31.3% 11.0% 1.1% 2.3% – 1.3% 3.8% 2.2% 2.0% 0.5% 1.4% 34.9% 100.0%

20 11 3 2 17 18 – 5 – – 15 7 – – – 2 100

17.5% 9.7% 2.8% 2.5% 15.5% 16.1% – 4.7% – – 13.4% 6.2% – – – 2.3% 100.0%

29 8 2 – 36 29 2 7 – – 20 8 5 4 1 10 161

16.7% 8.2% 2.5% – 19.0% 15.8% 2.0% 4.3% – – 10.7% 4.6% 2.3% 1.4% 3.0% 8.4% 100.0%

Parties in bold were part of the pre-electoral coalition of President Alvaro Uribe Vélez for his reelection in 2006.

party won fewer than three seats and the total number of seats for these parties declined from fifty-eight in 2002 to ten in the first party-list election. Thus, aided by the electoral system, the congress elected in 2006 consisted of fewer tiny parties with a primarily local or personalist profile. The broader national political context of these two elections is propitious for our effort to analyze the impact of legislative electoral rules on competition for legislative seats. Generally speaking, in presidential systems political coordination around the executive contest exerts a “pull” on legislative coordination, complicating the attribution of legislative outcomes to specifics of the legislative electoral system (Lijphart, 1994; Shugart, 1995; Amorim Neto and Cox, 1997; Jones, 1999; Clark and Golder, 2006; Golder, 2006, Kasuya 2009; Hicken and Stoll, 2011). However, in Colombia, and especially in 2002 and 2006, these “contaminating” effects of presidentialism are almost absent. First of all, the timing of elections minimizes presidential coattails because legislative elections occur before presidential, by eleven weeks. Moreover, Uribe ran as an independent both times, making it difficult for candidates to coordinate around a smaller number of parties. As a result, there were multiple parties in both legislative elections identifying as “uribista” rather than a single party seeking to capitalize on his coattails. We can also be confident that variation in fragmentation of the upcoming presidential contest did not have substantial effects on legislative coordination. The effective number of presidential candidates, a factor found by Jones (1999) to be a significant predictor of the fragmentation of the legislative party system, was almost the same in 2006 (2.22) as it had been in 2002 (2.56), despite the presence of an incumbent president in 2006 (a factor found to decrease fragmentation substantially in Jones’s multi-country sample). Table 2 summarizes the effective number of parties in each of these contests. As can be seen, the

legislative party system, with effective numbers in the 7–9 range, clearly is not affected by the low fragmentation of the presidential contest! Quite the contrary: the legislative and presidential party systems are about as distinct as could be imagined. Additionally, as Table 2 shows, the overall effective numbers do not change much from 2002 to 2006, suggesting that any effects we find from the electoral system at the district level are not being confounded by shifts in national-level fragmentation. Now that we have set the political scene by reference to national dynamics, we turn our attention to the empirical analysis of post-reform adaptation at the level of the electoral districts. The following empirical analysis is divided into two parts, with the first covering the inter-party dimension, while the second covers the intra-party dimension. 5. The impact of listization: the inter-party dimension On the inter-party dimension, as noted previously, we expect listization to result in a decrease in the number of competing parties in large-magnitude districts, relative to the former personalized system. Yet we expect reform to result in an increase in the number of competing parties in Table 2 Effective number of parties and presidential candidates, Colombia, 2002– 2006. Effective number of.

2002 10 March

Vote-earning parties House Senate Seat-winning parties House Senate Presidential candidates

2006 26 May

12 March

8.30 8.93

8.79 8.07

7.39 9.33

7.19 7.18 2.56

28 May

2.22

Source: Authors’ calculations, according to the Laakso and Taagepera (1979) index.

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smaller districts. That is, we expect inter-party competition to be characterized principally by mergers of formerly small parties in large districts, but splits in formerly dominant parties in small districts. For analyzing how aspirants for legislative office respond to incentives of the change from a personalized to a listized system, we are interested primarily in a measure of the number of parties arising prior to votes being cast. Yet we cannot simply count the number of parties on the ballot, because many of these parties will prove too small to have a perceptible impact on the race. Thus we need a concept of “pertinent” vote-earning parties, which we shall designate here as pv when it refers to the number under post-reform party-list PR, or p0v when it refers to prereform SNTV. We will also analyze the “effective” number of vote-earning parties (Nv , as defined by Laakso and Taagepera, 1979), which weights the parties by their actual votes cast, for comparability with the national figures reported above (Table 2). For “pertinent” parties, various cutoffs could be used, for example one or five percent of votes obtained (e.g. Ordeshook and Shvetsova, 1994; Chhibber and Kollman, 1998; Clough, 2007). However, a fixed share of the vote that is useful for national-level data or where magnitude is invariant is less appropriate for our purposes. We need a measure sensitive to magnitude variation. We will consider a party as “pertinent” if it won at least 25% of the vote share of the last seat-winning party in any given district. While any cutoff is arbitrary, our definition has the advantage of not being overly exclusionary (leaving aside small parties that might have affected competition) or overly inclusive (counting truly insignificant parties). How many pertinent parties “should be” expected? It is useful to have a baseline, in order to determine whether listization indeed has resulted in a change in the party system consistent with similar party-list systems. There remains in the literature a shortage of district-level analysis of the number of parties (however defined). Accordingly, we rely on Taagepera’s (2007: 244–5) estimate that the number of pertinent parties (which he does not define precisely) might be approximately:

pv ¼ M:5 þ 2M :25

(1)

Taagepera notes that Equation (1) fits well for many elections’ worth of data from Finland, which has a similar electoral system to that adopted in Colombia for 2006. Using Equation (1) as a starting point, we have two key objectives in our exploration of the number of pertinent parties. First, we seek to determine whether and to what extent the post-reform electoral system, in its first use, corresponded to expected patterns for list-PR systems. Second, we seek to determine the extent to which the result for 2006 reflects the change that we expect when compared to the result of the final pre-reform election of 2002, under extremely personalized rules: increased interparty competitiveness at the lowest magnitudes but increased coordination at the higher magnitudes. To test empirically the impact of reform, we ran a generalized estimating equations (GEE) model (Zorn, 2001) in which the level of observation is each district of the House of Representatives, before and after reform. Thus

the model includes district magnitude (logged), and this variable is interacted with the “treatment” variable, a dummy for electoral reform. The outcome variable is the district-level number of parties (logged), with models run on both pertinent parties (pv ) and the effective number of vote-earning parties (Nv ). Our model allows us to see if the relationship between magnitude and number of parties changes with the reform in-line with our expectations. We are interested in seeing how the decisions taken by political actors in merging or splitting pre-reform parties were reflected in the post-reform election. In doing so, we will also see how closely the regression estimate corresponds to Equation (1), which was derived by Taagepera as an expected relationship for systems like Colombia’s postreform system, independently of our research. The regressions are based on House data only, but we also will check graphically whether the separate institution of the Senate (M ¼ 100, nationwide) performs as if it were just another large House district, or whether it follows a different logic. Our preference for a GEE model over Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) stems from a concern with potential autocorrelation that could render OLS estimation inappropriate. The autocorrelation of residuals can be expected to occur at the district level, because elections that take place in the same district but at different points in time ought to be more similar than elections occurring in two different districts. GEE allows us to acknowledge and correct for the existence of the linear dependence amongst the observations.xii The results, displayed in Table 3, strongly support our expectations–for both outcome variables.xiii Moreover, Fig. 1 shows that there is little difference, in estimating pv , between the line derived from the regression on postreform data (the dashed black line) and Equation (1) (the solid black line). Fig. 1 also proposes the following expression for the data from the pre-reform election:

p0v ¼ :5 M þ M:75

(2)

Equation (2) (in solid gray), the derivation of which we will explain shortly, visibly performs as well in estimating the number of pertinent parties in the pre-reform system as does the purely empirical regression (in dashed gray). The lines for Equations (1) and (2) are extended out to M ¼ 100, the magnitude for the Senate. Based on the plotted results of the 2002 and 2006 Senate outcome, it is

xii We used an unstructured correlation working matrix to allows us to control for a wide variety of correlation patterns. The coefficients and their significance levels are the same for the GEE (shown below) or OLS (not shown). xiii A potential additional variable that could be included in a model of the number of parties might be one relating to the impact of the presidential election on coordination in legislative districts (Jones, 1999; Hicken and Stoll, 2011). In any case, models (not shown) that included the effective number of presidential candidates at the district level in the subsequent presidential election did not alter our results, nor did entering the percentage of the vote received by Uribe. We also explored models with other control variables available at the district level, such as the number of violent incidents (which might depress political competition). All of these additional variables were insignificant in most specifications and always left our coefficients of interest substantively unchanged.

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Table 3 Regression estimates, number of vote-earning parties before and after reform GEE population-averaged model. Dependent variable:

Constant Reform (treatment) District magnitude, logged Interaction (Reform  Distict magnitude, logged) Number of observations Number of groups Wald Chi2 Prob > Chi2

Number of pertinent vote-earning parties (logged)

Effective number of vote-earning parties (logged)

0.127 (0.084) 0.337 (0.102) 0.952 (0.121)

0.182 (0.067) 0.319 (0.078) 0.688 (0.105)

0.557 (0.133)

0.415 (0.110)

66

66

33 74.55 0.000

33 63.82 0.000

Standard errors (in parentheses) adjusted for clustering by district. Link: identity; Family: Gaussian; Correlation: unstructured. Transformed results (taking the anti-logs): Pre  reform p0v ¼ 1:3M :95 Nv0 ¼ 1:5:69 Post  reform pv ¼ 2:9M :40 Nv ¼ 3:2M:27

clear that the Senate behaves on this indicator almost as if it were just another large House district. For pertinent parties entering the race, this finding confirms the impact of our variables of interest, district magnitude and reform, even in a separate institution from the one for which the regression was estimated.xiv Equation (2) is derived from the observation (Table 3) that the intercept for the reform treatment is just over twice that of the untreated estimate, while the slope is reduced by just over 0.5; this leads to an estimate of the impact of this sort of electoral reform that may have theoretical implications, helping us tie the two dimensions of competition to one another. With trivial loss of precision, the relationship between the pre-reform (p0v ) and postreform (pv ) number of pertinent parties is approximately: p0v ¼ pv ð:5M :5 Þ. If we apply this expression to Equation (1), we get Equation (2). Is there a logical foundation to Equations (1) and (2)? If there is not, it would be just as good to report the empirical regressions and move on. However, we can do better than “post-dictive” regression equations (Taagepera, 2008), because what we want to move on to is the intra-party dimension. As we have made a consistent theme of this analysis, these two dimensions are logically related to one another: listization leads to a decrease in competition on one dimension at the same time as it leads to an increase on the other. We see in Fig. 1 a visual demonstration of the inter-party effect: increased number of pertinent parties with listization in the smallest districts, but decreased in larger districts. Can the structure of Equations (1) and (2), with two terms on the right-hand side, account for the mirror image of the change in intraparty competition? If so, we may have found a key to linking the two dimensions.

xiv For Nv, on the other hand, the equation estimated on House data would predict absurdly high values at M ¼ 100. This is because the large number of small parties that meet the standard of pertinence do not win many votes, and thus have little effect on Nv .

Fig. 1. The number of ‘pertinent’ vote-earning parties, by district magnitude.

We can think of the number of pertinent parties running as consisting of two components: (1) the number of parties that win a seat in the district, plus (2) some number of losing parties that reach the threshold of pertinence. This is how Taagepera (2007) explains the model represented by our Equation (1). For reasons he explains (pp. 118–22) the number of seat-winning parties is expected to be, on average, M:5 , for electoral systems such as list PR. Thus 2M:25 (the second term in Equation (1)) would be the number of pertinent losing parties expected for any given district magnitude. This term in Equation (1) tells us that the there would be, on average, two such parties if M ¼ 1, and that the number rises with magnitude, but at half the rate by which the number of winning parties rises. We can ask ourselves whether Equation (2) offers a similar breakdown of the number of pertinent parties when the election is held under the extremely personalized context of Colombia’s 2002 election. The superproportionality feature of SNTV implies that the exponent should be, theoretically, higher than 0.5 that Taagepera found for PR systems. We could posit that the exponent might be 0.75, which is the average of 0.5 (the expectation for PR) and 1 (the theoretical upper limit, by which every seat in a district is won by a different party). Exploration of this for Colombia’s 2002 election (not shown) revealed that this was close to accurate.xv So if the term, M :75 , in Equation (2) approximates the pre-reform number of seat-winning parties, perhaps the other term, 0.5M, signifies the number of pertinent losing parties that enter the race. If so, that the terms are in reversed order (when we multiplied Equation (1) by :5M:5, as discussed above) is consistent with our expectation that the reform from SNTV to list PR would result in a mirror image of the two dimensions of competition. We explain now what we mean by this, and the implications it has for the task of our next section, which is to explore competition on the intra-party dimension. As we sketched above in Section 3, we assume that aspirants for legislative office choose to enter the race in

xv

75.

The best fit would be around 0.81, which is a minor deviation from 0.

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a party where they will be one of two or more competitive candidates (an intra-party strategy) or the dominant candidate on a separate party (an inter-party strategy), depending on the incentives offered by the electoral rules. We noted that as district magnitude becomes large under SNTV, a distinct party label that appeals to even a very small share of voters may be sufficient to win a seat. Thus there are many parties that are essentially the campaign vehicle for an individual candidate. That there could be as many as 0.5M pertinent losers, per Equation (2), reinforces the atomization that is represented by a party system made up of so many very small parties. Yet at low magnitude, Equation (2) reminds us that the number of pertinent losers is not much greater than the number of seat-winners. In fact, at M ¼ 2, Equation (2) predicts 2.68 pertinent parties: 1.68 seat-winners and 1 pertinent loser. The actual averages are 1.67 and 1.33. Returning to Equation (1) and the list-PR election, we see that, in the larger districts, many aspirants for legislative office apparently enter on a smaller number of pertinent party lists, relative to the pre-reform system, because the number of pertinent losing parties rises much less steeply with magnitude than does the number of seatwinners (as well as much less steeply than either quantity rose under the pre-reform system). This dynamic represents the phenomenon of party mergers following the reform, as we posited: fewer parties that are effectively vehicles for one candidate’s cultivation of his or her personal vote, but a greater tendency for parties to contain multiple competitive candidates on their lists. Or, to put it another way, after the reform in large districts, more losing but competitive candidates are losing on the intra-party dimension rather than the inter-party, by being on the lists of seat-winning parties rather than running in separate parties. At smaller magnitudes, Equation (1) reflects the party splits that we posited we would see as candidates who formerly differentiated themselves by competing under the banner of one party label–when their personal votes accrued only to themselves–now differentiate themselves on separate party lists. As for Nv, the model in Table 3 shows a similar impact of reform, with a near doubling of the intercept, but a significantly lower slope. Thus, much like the number of pertinent parties, fragmentation based on votes cast rises at lower magnitudes and falls at higher magnitudes, relative to the pre-reform personalized system. The findings of this section, then, are remarkable. Focusing on our primary outcome variable, the number of pertinent parties, we were able to uncover a systematic relationship to district magnitude in the two different electoral systems. We suggested that the number of pertinent parties, both seat-winners and also rans, depends on the strategic incentives of legislative aspirants to enter on an existing party label (an intra-party strategy) or a new party (an inter-party strategy). However, in order to determine whether our logical basis behind the patterns depicted by Equations (1) and (2), is valid, it is obviously essential that we explore the intra-party dimension. Are we correct to say that the decline in both seat-winners and pertinent losing parties under list PR at higher M is accompanied by an increase in intra-party competitiveness,

compared to the former system? Are we right that intraparty competition was greater at lower magnitudes under the former system, and that it declines after a change to party-list competition? We will have successfully connected the two dimensions of competition only if we can find evidence that the answers to these questions are in the affirmative, possibly paving the way towards a more complete logical model (Taagepera, 2008) of how electoral systems operate on the two dimensions of representation. We explore the evidence from the intra-party dimension in the next section.

6. The impact of listization: the intra-party dimension If our premise regarding the “mirror” effect of the two dimensions is accurate, we should see systematic patterns of adaptation by individual parties according to district magnitude. That is, intra-party competition should be more extensive at the lower magnitudes under SNTV, but at the higher magnitudes following a change to open-list PR. To explore intra-party competitiveness, we look first at the propensity of parties to present either open or closed lists, taking advantage of this unique feature of Colombia’s new system. Then we consider the degree of actual competitiveness of both the post-reform open lists and the pre-reform parties. For the latter task, we define a first-loser ratio, or L1, as the votes for each party’s first losing candidate divided by the votes of its last winning candidate.xvi The ratio, L1 , would equal 1.0 if there were a tie for a party’s last seat. It would be zero if losing candidates of the party won no votes. The latter theoretical possibility draws our attention to strategic choices that parties make, under either SNTV or list-PR systems, for there are outcomes under both SNTV and list-PR that are effectively L1 ¼ 0, resulting from conscious efforts to restrict intra-party competition. Under SNTV, such an effort comes from limiting the number of endorsed candidates to one, while under list PR it comes from the decision to adopt a closed list. The personalization of SNTV allocation implies that some parties may seek to nominate not more than they can realistically elect. This situation is equivalent to one in which a party has a first-loser who won zero votes. Alternatively, a party may nominate more than it can elect, but then intervene in the campaign (Swindle, 2002), seeking to concentrate its votes on an electable subset of its candidates.xvii Our notion of the “mirror image” of the two dimensions of competition suggests that this strategy of restricting intra-party competition through nomination control and campaign intervention should be most prevalent at higher magnitudes, where inter-party strategies are widely employed: many entrants who are the sole competitive candidate of their party. Such parties will

xvi The variable is denoted L, for “loser’s ratio,” with a subscript for the rank of loser being evaluated. xvii

In our Bogotá example above, we noted that some small parties had more than one candidate, only one of whom was remotely competitive.

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exhibit first-loser ratios at or near zero. We shall test this expectation below. Similarly, presenting a closed party list is obviously a means to prevent intra-party competition. In a closed list, the first loser has obtained no votes. Of course, so have all candidates, including the winners; however, if we attributed preference votes to candidates on closed lists, sensibly all votes would be attributed to the winning candidates. Indeed, on closed lists that elect only one candidate, there is little difference between the actual closed list and a hypothetical open list in which one candidate obtained 100% of preference votes. In other words, under list PR, the most personalized parties may be those that present closed lists. This is a surprising claim, in that closed lists are generally assumed to be conducive to cultivating a party reputation (e.g. Carey and Shugart, 1995). In the analysis that follows, we first explore the patterns of choice of list type, and then turn our attention to first-loser ratios under SNTV and open lists. 6.1. Open or closed lists and personalization To consider whether the closed lists presented in Colombia in 2006 were indeed personalized, we will explore the choices of parties running incumbent legislators. Incumbency is typically a key asset in personal voteseeking (Cain et al., 1987). We hypothesize that closed lists typify parties born of party splits where an incumbent faces competitors (possibly including other incumbents) on other lists. Closed lists likewise could be the choice of parties running on the personal reputation of someone who is not a candidate in the district, for instance a House list associated with a Senate candidate or one associated with a presidential candidate or other national personality. A closed list deemphasizes the characteristics of multiple candidates on the list and facilitates highlighting either the list head or the national leader. On the other hand, parties that form from mergers, which thereby combine candidates (possibly including incumbents) from two or more pre-existing parties should present open lists. The pooling of votes across several candidates signals to the electorate the coordination and cooperation of formerly distinct parties, because a vote for any of them potentially helps elect others. These hypotheses regarding list type challenge existing understanding of intra-party competition, whereby closed lists are seen to encourage the articulation of a party’s

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reputation for programmatic policy, while open lists emphasize the personal reputations of individual candidates (Carey and Shugart, 1995). We do not claim that this conventional wisdom is wrong, but rather that it requires qualification. If a closed list is chosen by an incumbent splitting from an established party, the closed list may be little different from a “personal list” in that it is simply that incumbent’s reelection vehicle. On the other hand, while an open list clearly allows its candidates to differentiate themselves by emphasizing personal characteristics or constituency ties, when adopted by parties containing candidates from two or more formerly separate parties, it also symbolizes their cooperation and thereby promotes a collective party reputation. Table 4 shows the prevalence of closed lists at various categories of district magnitude, along with indications of how many incumbent legislators ran and were elected on each list type. It is immediately evident that open lists were much more common than closed, except at the smallest districts. Recall that it is precisely in the smallest districts where our conception of the mirror image led us to expect that the increased inter-party competition (seen by the rise in the number of pertinent parties, Section 5) would be accompanied by reduced intra-party competition. Obviously, to the extent that parties are presenting closed lists in small-magnitude districts, we are seeing exactly such limitations on intra-party competition. Overall, only about 20% of the pertinent parties in the House presented closed lists and only around 10% of Representatives and two Senators were elected on such lists. However, in the smallest districts, half the pertinent parties presented closed lists and 40% of the Representatives were so elected. All thirteen incumbents who ran, and all eight who were reelected, on closed lists were found in two-seat districts. The incumbents running on open lists, on the other hand, were found everywhere but the smallest districts (with a lone exception). In the two-seat districts, we see closed party lists that were essentially “personal lists.” Most were lists of Liberal incumbents; three of those who were reelected had switched to Cambio Radical. Our interpretation of this phenomenon is that these are popular local politicians known for (clientelistic) service to the district, but who now need to demonstrate being on the side of the president to ensure continuing ability to deliver. Hence, in the 2006 legislative election, which occurred eleven weeks before

Table 4 List type and incumbency, by district magnitude. District magnitude

No. of districts (and members)

No. of pertinent party lists

No. (and percent) of pertinent closed lists

No. of members (and percent) elected on closed lists

2 3–4 5–7 13–17 18 (Bogotá) House summary Senate

12 7 11 2 1 33 1

56 35 65 15 13 184 14

29 (51.8) 3 (8.6) 3 (4.6) 0 (0.0) 4 (30.8) 39 (21.2) 4 (28.6)

10 (41.7) 3 (12.0)a 2 (3.1)a 0 (0.0) 2 (11.1)a 17 (10.6) 2 (2.0)

(24) (25) (64) (30) (18) (161) (100)

Incumbents heading (and elected on) closed lists 13 (8) 0 0 0 0 13 (8) 0

Incumbents running (and elected) on open listsb 1 10 33 14 8 66 62

(1) (6) (19) (8) (6) (40) (46)

a Each category so marked includes one case in which two members were elected from a single closed list; all other members from closed lists were the sole candidate elected from their list. b Includes 13 incumbents who ran on open lists that failed to elect anyone.

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Uribe’s own reelection, they changed to a new, pro-Uribe, label. Other incumbents kept the Liberal label to emphasize their opposition to Uribe. While politicians with competing allegiances to presidential candidates could have run (and often did so) on a shared label under the purely personalized SNTV, after electoral reform they had strong incentives to differentiate themselves on separate lists–inter-party competition displacing intra-party. That the lists were closed made these lists effectively vehicles only for the election of the candidate ranked in the number-one slot–in this case an incumbent in each competing list. Several of the other pertinent parties presented closed lists to emphasize the personal reputation of a well-known politician. There were at least three such parties, associated with politicians based in Bogotá: Carlos Moreno de Caroxviii and two ex-mayors, Enrique Peñalosaxix and Antanas Mockus.xx Each of these lists could hardly be more “personalized”; the closed list allowed the party to downplay the identity of the candidates actually on the list and emphasize the extra-list leader. Peñalosa’s list elected two Representatives in Bogotá, but otherwise these closed lists were unsuccessful. Indeed, as Table 4 reveals, the successful parties outside of the smallest districts almost always had open lists, many of which contained multiple incumbents. Even defeated incumbents were often important to their party’s success, having contributing their personal vote to their list’s pooled total (as in the example from Valle in Section 3.2). 6.2. First-loser ratios in SNTV and OLPR Now we turn our attention to the first-loser ratios, comparing SNTV in 2002 to OLPR in 2006. We expect high competition (L1 approaching 1.0) where two conditions are present: (1) estimating the precise number of seats a party will win is difficult, and (2) intra-party votes pool to the party as a whole. Estimating the number of seats a party may win is most difficult under high magnitude (Cox, 1997: 103–6), meaning parties may have at least s þ 1 viable candidates (and hence a strong first loser). That votes pool to the list implies that the party has no reason to intervene and either restrict endorsements or attempt to reduce votes going to candidates other than the subset it determines are its most viable seat-winners. Thus we have a hypothesis: the higher the magnitude, the closer the L1 approaches 1.0, if the system is OLPR.xxi If high-M OLPR is the combination in which the highest values of L1 are expected, where might the lower values be found? Under OLPR, if a party’s s can be estimated with reasonable certainty, ambitious candidates will see little to gain from joining a list if it already has s viable candidates.

Because these estimates are easiest at low magnitudes, these are the districts where L1 would tend towards zero. However, when considering that some of these parties may actually have expectations of winning one additional seat, or information is poor about which of its candidates are viable, some parties (expected to be few in number) may have L1 approaching 1. Thus there may be a bimodal relationship for OLPR at low magnitudedsomething we will investigate below. Under SNTV, parties may make an effort to avoid an overdispersion of their candidates’ votes, given that their losers’ votes do not pool to help their more viable candidates obtain representation. That is, some parties may have more candidates running than they can elect, but will have sought to concentrate and equalize their votes on just an electable subset (L1 near 0). We expect higher L1 at low M than at high M under SNTV only because a party that has local dominance can attract multiple serious office-seekers and allow them to compete openly, with minimal risk of failing to win one or both seats (in a two-seat district). Otherwise, the personalizing logic of SNTV should lead to L1 being low. We explore the adaptation of parties on the intra-party dimension now by looking at kernel density estimates of first-loser ratios in the smallest and largest districts. If a kernel density shows a single large peak near 1.0, we know that the set of parties over which it was estimated tends to be competitive internally. If, instead, the peak is nearer zero, it indicates internally uncompetitive parties. A distribution without a single mode indicates variation in strategies within the set being analyzed.xxii If our expectations about the intra-party dimension mirroring the inter-party dimension are correct, we should expect the large districtsdwhere the inter-party result was party mergersdto show a shift towards greater competition with the reform. The smaller districts, on the other hand, where the typical inter-party effect was party splits, should tend to shift the other direction. Fig. 2 shows that this is indeed the case. In the largest districts (left panel of the figure), the OLPR election shows a sharp peak near 1.0. By contrast, under the former SNTV system the distribution is skewed towards the uncompetitive end. However, in the smallest districts (M ¼ 4 or less), there is somewhat greater tendency for intra-party competitiveness under the SNTV election than there was after the shift to OLPR. The open-list distribution is moderately bimodal, indicating some parties were internally competitive, while many were not.xxiii The kernel density estimates thus provide support for our expectation that changes on the two dimensions would

xxii

xviii

Moreno’s party was called Dejemos Jugar al Moreno; it presented an open list in the Senate, on which Moreno won 45% of the preference votes. xix The party was called Por el País que Soñamos. xx The Senate list for Visionarios con Antanas Mockus was likewise closed; Mockus himself was running for president. xxi Means (and standard deviation) for L1 : 2002, .51 (0.31); 2006, .60 (0.27). The ranges are 0.015–0.991 in 2002 and 0.080–0.997 in 2006.

To avoid biasing results in our favor, we have dropped from the analysis those parties that had no losing candidates (which would exaggerate the lower range of L1 ). Thus our results refer only to parties that actually nominated more than s candidates, so we can see whether losing candidates were competitive. xxiii

Kernel density estimates of the medium magnitudes, not shown, reveal little change from SNTV to OLPR. This also mirrors the inter-party dimension, where these districts were those with no significant change in the number of parties.

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Fig. 2. Kernel density plots of first-loser ratios by large and small magnitude.

mirror one another: where inter-party competition decreased through party mergers (large districts), intra-party competition increased; where inter-party competition increased (small districts), intra-party competition tended to decrease. Thus the analysis of patterns of competition within individual parties confirms the logical model outlined in our section on the inter-party dimension (Equations (1) and (2) in Section 5). There we explained the number of pertinent voteearning parties based on the joint impact of district magnitude on the number of seat-winning parties and of personalization versus listization on the tendency of additional aspirants to enter on existing parties or new ones. Here we reported evidence at the level of seat-winning parties, and saw that the two dimensions indeed mirror one another in their relationship of competition to magnitude.

7. Conclusions Our analysis leveraged a rare case of change in electoral formula with no accompanying changes in districting, and analyzed impacts on both the inter-party and intra-party dimensions. Although we considered only a single postreform election, our findings offer some insights into possible longer-term consequences that are of interest to scholars and practical reform advocates alike. In this concluding section, first we address some implications for Colombia itself, and then for the field of comparative electoral systems. Advocates of Colombia’s electoral reform had as one of their goals a reduction in the tendency of many small parties to be little more than personal campaign vehicles (Pizarro, 2001; Santana, 1998; Shugart et al., 2007). The results of the first post-reform election suggest they succeeded, in that the number of pertinent parties in larger districts has been reduced sharply, as has the effective number of parties. Reformers also sought to reduce clientelism and corruption, which is a serious issue given

xxiv

Dozens of legislators have been under investigation for ties to either drug-trafficking or paramilitary forces. See the regular reports of Congreso Visible (www.congresovisible.org).

Colombia’s problem with drug-trafficking.xxiv Of course, the success of this goal is much harder to assess, especially with one election. Nonetheless, along with the reduced number of microparties, increased intra-party competition in the larger districts may help. Clientelism is most favored by candidates who have what in Colombia is called the voto cautivo (captive vote, as discussed by Leal and Dávila, 1990: 35). That is, clientelist politicians tend to carve up the electorate in such a way that few votes are really “up for grabs,” with clientelist brokers delivering targeted benefits to a relatively stable electorate (Osterling, 1989: 164). Some scholars have seen open lists and high district magnitude as facilitating clientelism, as well as corruption (Chang and Golden, 2007). Yet we saw that, relative to SNTV, open lists have a beneficial party-building effect that is often overlooked in the literature. The basic impact of listization is that votes cast for one candidate on a list may assist the election of others, reducing the certainty of the beneficiary of an exchange upon which clientelism depends, as long as the list has competitive candidates beyond the expected seat-winners. In the smaller districts, on the other hand, the increased inter-party competition may also prove helpful for reformers’ goals. It is true that we showed that competing parties in small districts tend to be relatively uncompetitive internally, and many of them may be using labels that signify clientelistic ties to national leadership. Still, the mere presence of competing party labels should be salutary in the ability they give voters to affect the partisan balance in congress. Under SNTV, where the viable competitors in small districts often were of the same party, this opportunity did not exist. The impact of different systems on clientelism remains an underdeveloped area of comparative electoral studies. Future analysis of the impact of the Colombian reform over a sequence of elections may assist this research agenda. We caution that the “incentive to cultivate a personal vote” is not directly related to intra-party competition, as often assumed. Our results show that party-vote incentives are clearly enhanced at high district magnitude by the change from SNTV to open-list PR. Yet these parties have greater intra-party competition than was the case before reform. On the other hand, in small districts, many of the competing parties function essentially as campaign

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vehicles of individual candidates, many of whom run at the head of closed listsdthe list type usually understood to enhance party-vote cultivation. Thus our findings suggest a need to unpack the concepts that have heretofore guided research on personal vote incentives of electoral systems. Our analysis of the Colombian case has suggested a link between the inter-party and intra-party dimensions that could be theoretically useful beyond this case. Under personalistic systems, we showed, additional aspirants for office are more likely to enter on existing parties in smaller districts, but on their own new parties in the large districts. However, after listization, we confirmed our theory of a “mirror” effect, in which small districts tended to see party splits (with less intra-party competition resulting) but party mergers occurred in large districts (resulting in increased intra-party competition). The findings of this case thus suggest that in evaluating the effects or reform, or proposing actual electoral reforms, scholars and practitioners need to be cognizant of how the two dimensions of competition, inter-party and intra-party, are tied to one another. Acknowledgments We thank Royce Carroll, Scott Desposato, Joel Johnson, Santiago Olivella, Flavio Reyes, Rein Taagepera, and the anonymous reviewers for Electoral Studies for comments and advice. Professor Shugart acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation, grant SES-0452573. References Ames, B., 1995. Electoral strategy under open-list proportional representation. American Journal of Political Science 39, 406–433. Amorim Neto, O., Cox, G.W., 1997. Electoral institutions: cleavage structures, and the number of parties. American Journal of Political Science 41 (1), 149–174. Cain, B., Ferejohn, J., Morris, F., 1987. The Personal Vote: Constituency Service and Electoral Independence. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Carey, J., Shugart, M.S., 1995. Incentives to Cultivate a Personal Vote: A Rank Ordering of Electoral Formulas. Electoral Studies 14, 417–439. Chang, E., Golden, M., 2007. Electoral systems, district magnitude and corruption. British Journal of Political Science 37, 115–137. Chhibber, P., Kollman, K., 1998. Party aggregation and the number of parties in India and the United States. American Political Science Review 92 (2), 329–342. Christensen, R.V., Johnson, P.E., 1995. Toward a context-rich analysis of electoral systems: the Japanese example. American Journal of Political Science 39 (3), 575–598. Clark, W., Golder, M., 2006. Rehabilitating Duverger’s theory: testing the mechanical and strategic modifying effects of electoral laws. Comparative Political Studies 39 (6), 679. Clough, E., 2007. Strategic voting under conditions of uncertainty: a re-evaluation of Duverger’s law. British Journal of Political Science 37, 313–332. Cox, G., Shugart, M.S., 1995. In the absence of vote pooling: nomination and allocation errors in Colombia. Electoral Studies 14 (4), 441–460. Cox, G., 1997. Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World’s Electoral Systems. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

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