The role of 'electoral formulas' in the descriptive representation of citizens of immigrant origin

For many years, scholarly work has underlined that electoral systems are central in ensuring a fair representation of all groups in democratic societies. More proportional systems are based on the idea of mirror representation and aim at guaranteeing the inclusion of all components of society into the political system. Yet, other aspects of electoral systems also play a key role in that respect. Carey and Shugart (1995) develop electoral formulas based on four variables: the party control on the ballot structure (intraparty competition), the pooling, the number and types of votes cast and the district magnitude. Each electoral formula is supposed to impact the allocation of seats to specific candidates by influencing the value of personal reputation vs. party reputation. If their approach remains theoretical (mainly because of a lack of data), we propose to use this operationalization to measure the impact of these variables on the descriptive representation of citizens of immigrant origin (CIOs). Indeed, following the assumption based on rational-choice institutionalism, if political parties were not subject to incentives created by the electoral system, they would only nominate candidates with a majoritarian background or from the predominant minority social groups in order to maximize their chances to get seats (Norris, 2004). Some electoral formulas might create more incentives than others to select CIOs. Using data from all countries covered in PATHWAYS regarding electoral systems and the descriptive representation of CIOs, this paper proposes to test Carey and Shugart’s model by taking into account the position CIOs had on the list and the rank in which they were elected in fine as proxies of the values of personal and party reputation. Data collected provide opportunities to compare across countries but also over time as Italy, Belgium and The Netherlands, and to a certain extent Greece, have modified their electoral systems making them more candidate-centered during the period covered by PATHWAYS.