representation and electoral systems - American Political Science ...

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but goes well beyond Seats and Votes (Taagepera and Shugart 1989) because of
substantial advances since the publication of that classic in our understanding of the
relationship between electoral systems and party systems. The book represents the
culmination of almost four decades of painstaking research into unpacking, extending and
formalizing the Duvergerian macro-agenda with the goal of developing a parsimonious
model of electoral systems that can predict the number and size of political parties. That
research began with Taagepera’s 1969 MA thesis on “The Seat-Vote Equation” at the
University of Delaware, which he completed four years after earning a doctorate in
physics also at the University of Delaware. It is thus no coincidence that Taagepera’s
theory-building effort has embodied the rigorous analytical method of the hard sciences.
In Predicting Party Sizes, Taagepera draws on his basic research to also delve into the
realm of applied politics by offering practical advice to practitioners about the
institutional design of electoral systems they should adopt. This bold step is carefully
calibrated, however, to the predictions of the analytical models and the advice is thus
tempered with emphasis on what is feasible and not necessarily what is desirable, given
the political goals politicians wish to achieve. This incursion into applied scholarship
was motivated by the appreciation of the severe time constraints on practitioners’ ability
to consider all the possible consequences of institutional choice that Taagepera gained
through his own venture into politics, first as a presidential candidate in Estonia (“ending
a respectable third”) and then as the founding chair of a political party that, after his
tenure, won parliamentary seats before “crashing” (p. ix).
In contrast to the concern in much of the literature with the triviality that “institutions
matter” (as if there was any doubt!), Taagepera begins with a succinct exposition of
“How Electoral Systems Matter (Ch. 1) that appropriately emphasizes the remote effects
of electoral systems on the structure of party systems via their direct effect in restricting
seat distributions and subsequent effect on the vote distributions of political parties. But
Taagepera’s also draws attention to the exogenous conditions that limit the impact of
electoral systems: “An excellent institutional framework cannot compensate for flawed
political culture, but inadequate institutions can make it worse” (p. 5). Unwittingly,
Taagepera highlights an important but unacknowledged insight of institutionalism, that
the hallmark of good institutional analysis is an appreciation of both the limits of such
analysis and the bounds within which institutions shape political outcomes.
This modest approach helps to buttress Taagepera’s preference for the analytical rigor
and method of physics in developing the parsimonious predictive model of simple
electoral systems. To ensure that the substantive and technical complexity of the analysis
does not obscure its practical utility, Taagepera wisely begins each chapter with a block
of bulleted points “For the Practitioner of Politics,” which present in plain English the
key lessons of the chapter as guidelines for choosing electoral systems. The chapters are
themselves written in an engaging style with clear exposition of the mathematical
formulas, graphs and numerical data presented to clarify the theoretical arguments. The
more complex technical materials, such as proofs of equation, which should be of
interests to specialists, are appropriately consigned to an appendix to each chapter.