Votes from Seats

Matthew S. Shugart is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis, and an Affiliated Professor of the University of Haifa, Israel. He is a world-renowned scholar of democratic institutions. He is a two-time winner of the George H. Hallet Award. He won it first for his earlier collaboration with Rein Taagepera (Seats and Votes, 1989) and again for Presidents and Assemblies (1992, with John M. Carey). He has participated as an advisor on electoral-system reform and constitutional design in several countries. Since 2005, Shugart has maintained a blog, Fruits & Votes, which serves as a forum for discussion of how electoral systems shape politics in countries around the world. Rein Taagepera holds a Ph.D. in Physics. He is Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science , University of California, Irvine, and Professor Emeritus, Skytte Institute , University of Tartu, Estonia. The Johan Skytte Prize (2008) and the Karl Deutsch Award by the International Political Science Association (2016) would place him among the most prominent contemporary political scientists. His most recent books are Predicting Party Sizes: The Logic of Simple Electoral Systems (2007) and Making Social Sciences More Scientific: The Need for Predictive Models (2008). In 1992, he received about a quarter of the votes in Estonia's presidential elections and was the Founding Dean of a new School of Social Sciences at the University of Tartu.

• 1. Introduction: how electoral systems matter – for politics and for the scientific study thereof; Part I. Rules, Tools, and Context: 2. Components of simple electoral systems; 3. Components of complex and composite electoral systems; 4. The number of parties and proportionality – two key tools for analysis; 5. Examples of electoral systems: nationwide PR in Israel and FPTP in Trinidad and Tobago and India; 6. Two districted PR and list type: Finland, Portugal, and other cases; Part II. The Interparty Dimension of Assembly Politics: The Seat Product Model: 7. The seat product model of the effective number of assembly parties; 8. Winners plus one: how we get votes from seats; 9. Basic laws of party seats and votes - and application to deviation from proportionality; 10. All politics is national? How 'embeddedness' in a national assembly system shapes votes and seats in a district; Part III. Bringing the President In: 11. Coattails upside down: how assembly elections shape presidential elections; 12. How election timing matters in presidential democracy – and how it does not; Part IV. The Intraparty Dimension of Representation: 13. How electoral systems shape candidate vote shares; 14. Pooling or its absence: nomination and alliance behavior; Part V. What Can We Expect From Models of Electoral Systems?: 15. Extending the seat product model: upper tiers and ethnic diversity; 16. Complexities in electoral systems: do simple models work anyway? 17. Conclusion: substance and method.

'Set against today's emotionally charged issues of Russian misinformation attacks seeking to manipulate the 2016 and subsequent election cycles, and the Gerrymandering case currently in front of the US Supreme court, Votes from Seats: Logical Models of Electoral Systems is a timely and unreservedly recommended addition to both community and academic library Contemporary Political Science collections in general, and Electoral Systems supplemental studies lists in particular.' James A. Cox, Midwest Book Review