Geographical favouritism of parties and electoral systems

The task of this work is to identify the phenomenon of geographical favouritism in parties and electoral systems, which consists in the degree of the tendency of the latter to territorial differentiation. In our opinion, this is a mandatory step towards finding ways to take into account the degree of spatial distortion of the electoral and party systems of public choice, which in the future should enable multiple comparative electoral and geographical studies. Based on the analysis of all existing electoral systems, it is concluded that proportional elements reduce the potential of geographical favoritism of electoral systems, while majoritarian ones, on the contrary, strengthen it. In the article, electoral systems are distributed according to the level of potential geographical favoritism: it turns out to be the highest in majority systems, and the lowest in proportional and intermediate-average systems, respectively, in semiproportional and preferential ones. The effect of geographical favouritism in mixed (compensatory) systems is close to the result in proportional systems with several districts. In non-compensatory systems, it depends on the effect of the majoritarian component. In the work, the elements or properties of electoral systems are divided into two categories: those that strengthen or weaken geographical favouritism. Having estimated the number of certain elements or properties present in a particular electoral legislation, we can conclude about the degree of geographical favouritism of the electoral procedure used in the country. Two variants of calculating the index of geographical favouritism are proposed, which is necessary for comparative electoral-geographical research, since it allows comparing election results without correction for distortions of the regional distribution of votes. The first index is more suitable for analyzing more similar electoral processes, say, several cycles in the same state, and the second is for comparing fundamentally different electoral systems.

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