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1. Introduction
Inspired by Maurice Duverger’s seminal work (Duverger 1954), an inquiry into political
consequences of electoral institutions has become one of the most vibrant research programs
in modern political science (cf: Riker 1982). Presumably under the influence of Duverger’s
original discussion, this literature consists of two traditions of investigations, which are yet to
be systematically integrated. On the one hand, Duverger’s notion of “psychological factor,”
namely voters’ distaste of casting a wasted ballot, is now firmly linked with the concept of
strategic voting developed in the legislative study (e.g. Farquharson 1969) and this subset of
the literature has generated innovative and increasingly comparative insights on voters’
strategic behavior, parties/candidates’ strategic entries into electoral competition, as well as
social and other limitations that interact with these actors’ rational decisions (e.g., Riker
1976; Ordeshook and Shvetsova 1994; Neto and Cox 1997; Cox 1997; Chibber and Kollman
1998). On the other hand, the inquiry into what Duverger called “mechanical effect,” which
is now typically understood as the patterned biases that occur in the translation of the given
votes into the distribution of seats, has had the tendency to be descriptive and technical in
identifying (and often normative in raising concerns about) problems of disproportionality
between seats and votes (e.g.
Rae 1967; Taagepera and Shugart 1989, 1993). Theoretically,
mechanical properties of an electoral system may affect the seat distribution according to
numerous dimensions in addition to the above much-studied vote/seat translation biases, and
their effects can be politically consequential either through actors’ strategic behavior (which
itself is an induced reaction to a system’s mechanical working) or independent of it. A
Convention