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'Politics', Harold Lasswell (1936) famously observed, is about 'who gets what, when and how'. Lasswell, of course, was not the only one to define politics as a question of distribution and redistribution. David Easton's definition of politics as 'the authoritative allocation of values for a society' is but another famous example (Easton, 1965: 3). One would have thought, therefore, that political scientists would have paid more attention to studying the impact that political institutions (such as electoral systems) have had on this 'allocation of values'.
This has not been the case. Indeed, most research on electoral systems has focused on the political implications of electoral systems, such as which system is most likely to lead to the formation of coalition governments, durable cabinets and such like. See Morelli (2002) for a fairly recent example. This work has been rather successful. We have been able to extrapolate from our knowledge about electoral systems to the shape and sizes of party systems, as was recently presented in Taagepera's (2007) Predicting Party Sizes: The Logic of Simple Electoral Systems. The research to date has given us a fairly good - though still incomplete - understanding of the connection between the two systems in a more specific and quantitative way than was done impressionistically (Blais and Carty, 1991). In other words, we have - broadly speaking - been able to answer questions like, how do electoral rules determine, on average , the number and size of parties? And for simple electoral systems, we have by now a pretty good idea of the causal relations and soft determinants. But for more complex rules it quickly becomes fuzzy, and political culture interacts with electoral rules in surprising ways (for an overview see Gallagher and Mitchell, 2008).
Yet it remains the case that 'the analysis has generally been confined to purely political phenomena, such as the number of parties, the propensity of crisis, etc.' (Persson, 2002: 886). Questions as to the policy effects of electoral systems have been few and relatively far between, and are absent from the most frequently cited studies in the field. For example, the term 'policy' rarely appears. It does not feature in the indices of books on electoral and party systems by Farell (2001); Lijphart (1994) or...